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On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Jack Phoenix jack@countervandalism.netwrote:
To those who don't know me yet, hi! I'm Jack Phoenix, and I've been a MediaWiki developer since May 2008.
Hi Jack, nice to hear from you again :)
Yep... the site's running MediaWiki 1.12 (!), which is four years old. In software development, four years is an eternity.
"Just" 4 years? I thought it was older but you're right. 1.12 is from 2008 and it does seem an eternity ago.
Fortunately wikiHow publishes their source code at http://src.wikihow.comand a new dump will be generated each Monday.
For those wondering, the url is http://src.wikihow.com (without "and") and I'd like to add that this awesome service has been up for quite a while (it is not new), it's been up at least for a few years now, and doing great! However they are static (.zip) dumps of the wikihow source code. Although wikiHow does use SVN internally, the actual repo is not public.
(User:Lcawte) created a Google Code repository for the project. You can see the project page at http://code.google.com/p/wikihow/
Aside from the importing of the weekly dumps of the real source code, I'm not sure what is going on there or why there is a copy of MediaWiki 1.18 in there. If the goal is to basically re-construct wikiHow on a MediaWiki 1.18 base instead of 1.12 (without core hacks this time), then why the copy of MediaWiki? Just an idea but maybe only keep the following in the "new" repository, with instructions for users that are helping out to install MediaWiki core, and then checkout the repo and symlink and/or include them from the wikihow repo:
* ./extensions/* [all awesome wikihow-made extensions] * ./extensions/WikiHow/WikiHow.php [custom settings of wikihow sites] * ./skins/WikiHow
Maybe even on top of MediaWiki core "master" instead of the latest release so that if you need any additional hooks in MediaWiki core (which likely will be the case on several occasions), you (or someone else) can propose them and after they're reviewed/merged into core you can use them right away.
-- Krinkle
PS: Regarding git, if you're afraid of Gerrit but have no problem with using a third party for hosting (Google Code in this case), you could also try GitHub which tends to be a very friendly introduction to Git for most people I know. Especially the concept of "pull request" is very well thought trough there. And as a bonus, there is no dependency on GitHub since, contrary to SVN, everybody has the entire repository so you can work offline and maybe even one day host it elsewhere.