Hi all,
here is another update on what the Multimedia team is doing. We have missed
a few updates recently, so in the highlights section I'll try to cover for
the main events of the last four weeks.
== Media Viewer ==
=== User highlights ===
* The main focus of our work was to help people who want to reuse images in
various ways. There is now a "Use this file" button at the bottom right
corner which brings up various reuse options (a permanent link to the
file, wikicode to put it in an article, HTML code to put it on a webpage,
download in various sizes). This is still a work in progress; expect minor
improvements in styling and wording, and better attribution information.
* You might have noticed that the URL in the browser's address bar changes
when you open an image in MediaViewer, and that this URL can be used to
open the image in MediaViewer directly.
Such links (e.g. [1]) now work on all sites and for all users, whether they
enabled MediaViewer as a beta feature or not. (We don't promise that the
current URLs will work for long, though - we are planning some breaking
changes to make the URL format more user-friendly, such as not having
spaces in the middle.)
* MediaViewer has gotten more clever about which images to display - icons
in templates are usually ignored. (This relies on templates having a
.metadata class, like on enwiki.)
* Partially transparent images now have a checkered background.
=== Developer highlights ===
* Appending ?download to a thumbnail URL will make it download instead of
open (a Content-Disposition header will be set).
* <img> elements now have data-file-width and data-file-height attributes
with the width and height of the original file. (Cached pages are not
purged automatically, so for a couple weeks these attributes might or
might not be present on any given page.)
* You can use mw.config.set('wgMediaViewerOnClick', false) to stop
MediaViewer from catching clicks on images (there is a user preference
that does the same, but this might be useful to disable it in specific
circumstances only). You can also use
mw.config.set('wgMediaViewer', false) to disable MediaViewer completely.
=== What we did last week ===
We fixed bug 63126 [2], made progress on the download functionality [3][4],
enabled direct URLs for all [5], added an opt-out preference [6], improved
UI responsiveness when clicking on an image [7][8][9] and picked bawolff's
brain on the missing file description page bug [10].
=== What we're gonna do this week ===
We will test and fix IE 9-11 support [11][12] (IE 8 and below is currently
not supported by some of the libraries we use, which will take more effort
to fix). We will continue improving the file reuse panel [13][14][15], show
more prominent links to the file page [16][17], show a button to open
MediViewer from the file description page [18], show a user survey [19],
and improve our metrics [20][21][22][23].
=== Release plans ===
We plan to enable MediaViewer for all users on
mediawiki.org on April 10, and
on the Catalan and Hungarian Wikipedias (and possibly other
small-to-medium-sized wikis which requested it) on April 17.
== UploadWizard ==
Anu's OPW project about OpenStreetMap integration officially finished last
month, although the work is still ongoing; the report was sent to some
mailing lists but I think this one was accidentally omitted. You can read
it at [24].
== Process ==
In the past, we have set an ambitious schedule for work on MediaViewer, which
resulted in other multimedia-related areas being completely abandoned unless
someone else picked them up (thanks especially to Bryan Davis and Brian Wolff
for doing that a lot!). This wasn't fair, and we are trying to change that -
we are now experimenting with setting a few hours per week apart for code
review and high priority bugs.
We also set up a more visible reminder to make sure we don't miss more daily
updates.
== Comments ==
are, as always, welcome. If you think we did/are doing something wrong
(or just want to praise us :), do not hesitate to reply.