Re: [Mediawiki-l] Case Study: KDE Userbase wiki

Hello all, as it was requested i will write about userbase.kde.org and how we did and do things there. First of all, it is part of a wiki farm, we have more than one wiki, the 3 most important ones being userbase/techbase/community.kde.org . The intention is to use as much in common as possible, the source is shared and we use a config switch. Some global config files provide the parts in common, only things like db credentials, wiki title etc are done in the specific configs. We have a svn checkout from the recent branch of MW running, same counts for the extensions, to make sure we can react quick on wishes for new enabled extensions. Of course it is always our wish to provide a custom look to our KDE sites, hence we developed the theme called chihuahua for our wikis on our own. Which was probably the hardest part. MW's default theme vector was long analyzed to see what needs to be done, our designer did the mockups. Originally we only wanted a left side sidebar, but after some tests we noticed that can't be it, so we implemented a sidebar switch, with which you can choose the position of the sidebar (but only as an easter egg ;) ) As anyone knows, the toughest part was to make the design look good in any case, when someone adds styles to a page. We wanted a multilingual wiki. The way wikipedia does it was not good enough for us. We wanted pages the same in every language, content-wise. So our most important extension is the translate extension (translatewiki.net). We work together with their team, especially Niklas Laxström. It provides us with anything we need from a translation, even offline editing, which is very important for our core KDE translators, as they are used to their po-file tools. Other important extensions are http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SphinxSearch (we were already used to sphinx due to our forum) , http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi (we have many code snippets on the pages, so to make it look nice) , http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads (many discussions take place in the wiki, so we can handle them better), http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID (no explanation needed, right? :P). Lately we have now a modified Openid plugin, as KDE provides a single sign up page, which is based on LDAP. Unfortunately merging existing accounts into that was not so easy, so we modified the openid extension. Handling those modifications is not that hard, we recently switched to a git hosted revision control system. Our developers checkout MW locally from svn, git merge does the rest quite fine. The server checks out regularly from KDE's git server. Hope this gives a nice overview. Cheerio, Ingo