*Hi everybody,
Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser from Hallo Welt! presented their
MediaWiki-based enterprise distribution
BlueSpice<http://www.blue-spice.org/>yesterday. Around 6-7 people
attended the online meeting, but I believe
some of those who were unable to will be interested in the cool features
Richard and Markus showed us, so I am sharing a summary below. Please read
on :)
BlueSpice was developed over the last 6 years. It is installed on top of
vanilla MediaWiki and offers a bundle of extensions, some MediaWiki-native
and some proprietary to BlueSpice. Customers get assurance of the
compatibility of the bundle with given MediaWiki versions as well as a
roadmap of future releases. The basic BlueSpice distribution comes for
free, while support, training, special packages, etc. are paid for.
Hallo Welt! are planning to move to Git in the next few months and open up
BlueSpice to the MediaWiki community. The code is currently available for
anyone to look at and reuse. However, If you want to submit a patch, you
have to email them. This will change soon. Also, documentation in English
is limited but they are working on translating all materials/docs/demos in
the next several months.
BlueSpice offers the following features catering to the enterprise user :
WYSIWYG editor
- might be replaced by VisualEditor soon but was a major advantage of
BlueSpice so far
- easy creation of tables
- easy upload of photos and files
- interface for insertion of magic words
- easy insertions of links within the wiki with a drop down menu of
articles
- still need to use wikicode a little
Improved search
- advanced options
- filter (by namespace, etc.)
- suggestions as you type
- search file names
Advanced administration panel
- user management
- manage email, rights, passwords
- connects to LDAP, allows single signon
- extensions management for BlueSpice extensions
- list of extensions with status (stable, beta)
- automatic testing of extensions
- in the next release it will show you when a newer version of an
extension exists and what kind of update it is (security, feature)
- in the future they hope to have a common repository for BlueSpice
and other MediaWiki extensions with the ability to switch
extensions on/off
and update from the UI
- permission manager - assign permissions to users
- namespace manager - no need to touch the config files
- add, edit properties
- merge namespaces
- delete namespaces and backup pages in them
PDF export
- you can organize your contents in a hierarchical navigation menu (like
a book with chapters and articles) and you can export a chapter as pdf (
soon openoffice and Word doc as well )
- you export to predefined templates
- you get all linked attachments in the pdf as well
- excellent for creating up-to-date manuals and technical documentation
with a click
Improved navigation
- status bar on top of article - last updated, by whom, responsible
editor
- every user has a personal navigation bar depending on his preferences
Article feedback
- you can assign responsible editors for articles
- article review tool - you can ask certain people to review a draft
article, define a review period, etc.
Statistics
- improved statistics with visualization, diagrams, etc.
- you can look at history of searchers with counts
- RSS feeds
Skins
- they offer a few skins but want to improve on that
SMW + BlueSpice?
- theere are several examples that use both and it works without
conflicts
- there are some conflicts in terms of user experience (Semantic Forms
vs BlueSpice editor) but no conflicts
- there is no integration between the two yet, even though there is
potential for that
Release Cycle
- once or twice a year - releases - patch releases more often
- trying to follow MW release cycle since download rate went up 3 times
as they released a version supporting newer MW versions recently
Richard and Markus can correct me or add more detail. For technical
details, ask Markus Glaser.
Mariya
*
Hi all,
If you look at the quarterly
goals<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Mileston…>
announced
by the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department you can see
implementation of the Configuration
database<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Configuration_database>as
a goal for the first half of 2013. Configuration should be easier and
less fragile with the database replacing .php config files. The database
seems particularly interesting for wiki farms. Take a look, share your
opinion, and follow its development.
P.S. You can learn about other interesting projects going on from the goals
page.
Regards,
Mariya
Hi everyone,
Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser from Hallo Welt! in Germany will present
their MediaWiki enterprise distribution
BlueSpice<http://www.blue-spice.org/> on
Feb 26 at 6PM UTC.
The meeting will be held via Netviewer. To participants just follow the
link below and you will be prompted to download a client software for the
session.
*https://get.netviewer.com/meet/join.php?sinr=953388244&sipw=nv64*<https://get.netviewer.com/meet/join.php?sinr=953388244&sipw=nv64>
I will send a reminder before the meeting.
Mariya
Support for DB2 is in MediaWiki, but it is pretty much unmaintained.
Is there anyone on this mailing list who is using it for their MediaWiki
installation?
It seems like a good candidate to drop from support.
--
http://hexmode.com/
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
-- Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"
Hi all,
Forwarding some interesting information about MediaWiki's release cycle for
those who might not have seen Mark's email.
Mariya
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark A. Hershberger <mah(a)everybody.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 5:02 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Release policy
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
After the discussion last week, I want to scope out a release policy so
that we'll all know what to expect.
* A major release will be made every six months.
* An LTS release will be made every two years. There will be a one-year
overlap in LTS support. For example, 1.19 is supported until May 2015.
1.23 will be released the year before that so that people will have 1.23
available as an LTS to move to and a year to make the transition.
* Releases notes will continue to be the basis for seeing what has
changed. Because of the nature of a volunteer-driven project, it isn't
possible to say with any certainty what *will* happen in the next 6-12
months.
* To mitigate the problem of release notes, we will publish a list of
new features in the upcoming LTS relative to the last LTS six months
before it comes out. This means that about the time when 1.22 comes
out, we'll have an announcement for 1.19 users letting them know what
changes they can expect in 1.23.
* Point releases will be made periodically. Frequency TBD. Every point
release will include updated i18n files as well as any bug fixes. No
new features will be back-ported to point releases.
Thanks,
Mark.
--
http://hexmode.com/
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
-- Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"
_______________________________________________
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Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hi ,
No one brought this up as an issues but I was wondering if converting from
another wiki to MediaWiki or the other way around is a problem for people
and new tools to do that would be useful. How often is it needed and how is
it currently done? I see mostly old posts and tools around. From lookng at
http://www.richardcarterconsultancy.com/2011/12/twiki-to-mediawiki-conversi…
and
http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?8098-Moving-to-MediaWiki-from-…
infer it's not an easy task.
Also, it doesn't seem (from my humble observation) to be done often. Is
that because its not needed or because of the lack of friendly tools?
Thank you.
Mariya
(Adding a couple of mailing lists so others can weigh in. Changing
subject so those added aren't completely lost.)
On 02/21/2013 11:55 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
> Ok, just a question as humble 3rd party MediaWiki user and technical
> volunteer coordinator at the WMF: is there a possibility to consider
> having a regular free software release process?
>
> master/unstable ---> (testing releases?) ---> stable releases
...
> I think the current process is ok-ish in the short term: non-WMF
> contributors are getting +2 and 3rd parties are getting tarballs.
As you say, I think the current process is Ok(ish) for now. We need to
get others in the MediaWiki "ecosystem" involved in core before this
becomes something we really need to do.
It would be great to have developers from other significant MediaWiki
sites (like Referata, Wikia, Citizendium, etc) become more involved and
start introducing features or hooks that they use into core or making
the extensions available. Of course, some of those developers have
already been involved.
But right now, I don't sense a huge amount of friction between the WMF's
needs and the non-WMF MediaWiki-using community. The most that can be
said is that the WMF is focused on its sites and doesn't make third
party use a priority. This doesn't stop support for other databases,
though: Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or even my recent changes to
separate out DB schema changes in MySQL.
That said, I'm very interested in this conversation. As MZ will remind
you, I did advocate for the formation of the MediaWiki Foundation.
Mark.
--
http://hexmode.com/
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
-- Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"
Hi guys!
Can anybody tell about the success story you've had with MediaWiki?
If you're not a good writer, here is the list of interesting questions. Of
course you can describe your story without looking at them.
- What was the project about?
- Who was the customer? Was it an open project?
- What the community looked like? Where those people on the wiki came from?
- Why you've chosen MediaWiki and not another solution?
- Did you program anything additional for MediaWiki, did you integrate with
some other services and applications?
- Or maybe you've elaborated some tricky methodology?
- How did the project change the life of your customer?
- Was the community motivated? How active they were?
- Did you provide any kind of support and consulting?
- Maybe you've provided admins, moderators, facilitators? How did you teach
them?
- Did you have any trainings?
- Anything about money? $-)
- What obstacles and difficulties have you faced?
- How much time did you spend on a different stages of your project?
- Do you have any open results? The project itself, the skins, extensions,
papers, articles, photos of the happy users?
- What have you learnt from the project?
- In general: was it worth it?
Cheers,
Yury Katkov, WikiVote