Setting up a page in labs isn't too hard, you and jan both have admin access to the `search` project in wikitech. I've gone ahead and booted up a new instance there for you, portal.eqiad.wmflabs.  I've also added a proxy for it, http://portal.wmflabs.org.

Quite often the easiest way to set something like this up is to make a git repository, and then have a cronjob on the portal just auto-update the git repository. If you want to go that way i can make you a new repo in gerrit or however you want to do it.

For the moment i just copied rutherfordium.eqiad.wmnet:~jgirault/public_html to portal.eqiad.wmflabs:/var/www 

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 6:52 PM, billinghurst <billinghurstwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Julien,

I would like to see some examples that are run for the sister wikis,
at the moment the trend is for the examples to be very wikiPedia
specific. It would be useful to see how these things are useful for
the whole wikimedia set of sites. Also for portals, there would be
value in providing results in other languages, and sisters.  That we
limit a search result to the one place we stand rather than the
neighbourhood in which we live, indicates living in a world with
imposed blinkers.

-- billinghurst

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 12:58 PM, Julien Girault <jgirault@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The Discovery Portal team has been thinking about a Portal Labs page.
>
> The idea is that we can implement some revolutionary ideas for our portal
> page, things that are completely different than what the current portal page
> looks like, and deploy it on this site for real users to use. But without
> imposing a disruptive user experience to our users. We can put a link to
> this page on the production portal page (in the bottom?), and users can have
> an option to bookmark the page, and maybe make one of the experiments their
> default.
>
>
>
> We would have two trains:
>
> - Slow train: running regular A/B tests (like the one we just ran) on the
> official portal page and deploying small improvements as we learn.
>
> - Faster train: "Revolutionary" prototypes in Labs where we also collect
> traffic and clickthrough rate to measure user satisfaction. We can also
> implement a "Send a Feedback" feature (or have a link on the prototype page
> that points to a Phab ticket where community can add comments/feedback).
>
> To give you an example of what we mean by revolutionary ideas, I uploaded
> some of my research time work:
> https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/
>
> Pay closer attention to:
> Trending Showing top 9 articles (grid)
> Trending Showing top 10 articles (full screen)
>
>
> This would allow us to think outside the box and test different
> layouts/features, with real users who chose to.
>
>
>
> This is kind of a crazy idea, and we want to know what you all think about
> it. Also we would need some naming ideas for it. Portal labs, or beta
> portal, or something else.
>
> Please let us know what you think about this, how you think we can go
> towards making this happen and what we should name it.
>
> Thanks!
> Julien
>
> _______________________________________________
> discovery mailing list
> discovery@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
>

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