Hi everyone,
I have been talking to some third-party users trying to learn more about what they would like to see happening in MediaWiki in the near future. Here is a list of the things on the wish list, with the ones on top being more popular.
Please let me know if you know of an existing extension or another solution for these problems, if you are currently working on something similar or would be interested to, or if you have any general comments/feedback you would like to share. I did some searching and included what I found but I have no experience with the mentioned extensions so I am not sure how relevant/stable they are.
1. WYSIWYG editor - VisualEditor is in progress !
2. Integrated access control: ability to hide some pages from the groups of users. Fine grained read access in the wiki. Some extensions that I found addressing the problem. Extension:AccessControl http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AccessControl- has a security disclaimer Extension:Access_Control_Panel http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Access_Control_Panel- an old beta Extension:Access_Control_List http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Access_Control_List- developers site down
3. More modern skins included in MediaWiki or at least easier extension development and maintenance. Are there any skin suits you know of and would recommend? Any good skinning resources ? e.g. http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/ 4. The implementation of Semantic MediaWiki on mediawiki.org website in order to manage easily extensions pages.
5. Wiki-markup editor for template gurus - with autocompletion, syntax highlight, template parameters suggestions: more like markup IDE.
6. An easy way to share wiki content on social media services. Extension:AddThis http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AddThis - seems like a solution, any opinions? Also: Extension:Facebook http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Facebook - just Facebook Extension:WikiShare http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiShare - unstable version, seems like it's not worked on any more
7. Built in support for Google Analytics Extension:Google_Analytics_Integrationhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Google_Analytics_Integration(latest version 2009) http://karenfreemansmith.com/2011/02/10/adding-google-analytics-mediawiki/
8. Built in support for XML Sitemaps without using command line Extension:GoogleNewsSitemaphttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GoogleNewsSitemap
9. Built in support for Google Adsense in popular layout positions Extension:Google_AdSense_2http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Google_AdSense_2
10. Easy way of gracefully retiring old tags (e.g. Google Maps extension is no longer supported, replaced with Maps which has different tags)
11. Update to the documentation about creating a simple extension that is XSS safe.
12. Mobile version for website that turns with MediaWiki - this is in progress http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_support_in_MediaWiki_core
13. MediaWiki Core API. "Not the HTTP-API but the set of PHP classes in the core that are less likely to change in the next version. Core developers to think about MediaWiki as framework with programming interfaces for extension developers. All the changes in those interfaces have to be calm, with slow deprecation. A role model for that is Python compiler."
Sorry for the long email and thank you if you made it here. The alternative was to send many emails and I thought that would be too spammy :) More to come soon !
Mariya