On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 6:04 PM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
I'd like to add distribution as one of the pain points. I wanted to have the templates that are available on enwiki for another Mediawiki installation, but I couldn't get them to work. It seems like every template has a maze of dependencies, and when I resorted to exporting all of the templates from the Mediawiki site, the software consistently crashed before all templates were exported.
This sounds like a bug. Does anyone know of related bugs in bugzilla?
I might have been doing it wrong, but I couldn't find any other options.
One option is to use a tool (e.g. pywikibot) to transfer each template.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot
This script transferbot.py does some of the required work, but it would be nice if it was improved to detect and copy any dependencies semi-automatically.
https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/pywikibot%2Fcore.git/HEAD/scripts%2Ftransferb...
Ideally, something like a package management system for templates,
+1
.. extensions, and skins would be a godsend.
This seems to be unrelated to templates, as they rarely depend on extensions or skins, and deploy of templates is a very different mechanism to deploy of extensions and skins. fwiw, package management systems do include separate packages for commonly needed extensions and skins.
(Wouldn't it be nice if all skins could be written in Lua + LESS stored as wikipages on the wiki, instead of distributed as php files; I know of one LESS skin which works well: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Chameleon ; are there others?)
-- John Vandenberg