MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
[...] I'm a bit concerned about the diversity of the tools made by each of us. Almost every user utilises its own library of files for providing a skin, db access... Which make integrating them into something coherent quite hard. These multiple frameworks may also be an effect of the large applications ban. [...]
I had similar thoughts recently when faced for the n-th time with accessing Wikipedia per MySQL (on the toolserver) or the API (elsewhere) in Perl. It would be nice to have one module with an interface that can be used by Toolserver users and others as well. Skins fall into this category as well: I think most developers could easily adapt their tools to use a centralized skin, but wouldn't bother to implement one by themselves that is accessible and usable.
Right. Or if the Toolserver is horribly lagged, switch to the API silently to get the most recent data. I've had similar thoughts.
While we all dream of a world in which there's no duplicated coding effort, the reality of these Toolserver tools is that every developer has a programming language preference. You're Perl, I'm Python, others are PHP. So ultimately, I don't know how much integration there can really be.
Well, there are 684 directories in /home, so there will probably be more than one project in Perl, Python or PHP :-).
Even if only for PHP there would be a critical mass, it'd be still useful to Perl, Python and other developers. For example, I think it is a common problem to normalize links - e. g., are "[[Diskussion:ABC_abc#.C3.A4.C3.B6.C3.BC]]" and "[[de:Talk:aBC abc#äöü]]" pointing at the same resource? Most developers start with the easy bits and end up with something that works for most of their use cases, but fails if that line is overstepped (for example "Image:" -> "File:"). If there was an existing module for this, you wouldn't have to think about all the fringe cases yourself, but could base upon the sweat poured by others :-). If Me- diaWiki got updated, you would just have to look at the changes in the PHP module and port them to your language of choice.
Consistent styling (importing a common CSS file) is easy enough, though. As long as, y'know, it isn't ugly. ;-)
AFAICS, common CSS wouldn't be enough for a "consistent" user interface.
Tim