Felipe Sanches wrote:
After all these 42 messages, is there anybody working on this feature at all?
No. Only Nick Jenkins was actually interested in doing anything, in the role of UI designer, and even he didn't go as far as the original post called for. Given my failure to convince anyone to work on one of my ideas, I've been taking a different approach over the past week or so: supporting existing development efforts on the client side.
There is a lot of pure client-side development going on, based on modifications to site or user javascript. I'm attempting to improve those client-side features by adding customised server-side interfaces for them, essentially turning them into hybrid client/server features. Then, if the client-side developer will allow me to, I can move the client side component into the extensions module as well, thereby creating a hybrid extension which will work on all MediaWiki wikis with minimal installation effort.
The extensions which I am working on are:
* ProofreadPage. This is an extension to support transcription of scanned images on Wikisource. The client-side developer is ThomasV. It is mostly complete, and currently enabled on fr.wikisource.org. * PicturePopups. This is an AJAX-based extension to display image licensing information in a popup over the image. The client-side developer is zocky. Work is ongoing. * JOrbisPlayer. Greg Maxwell is the client-side developer, he has created a demo on the toolserver at http://tinyurl.com/fsbu7 . We are in the specification development stage.
These have all come about because the client-side developers have approached me on IRC, asking some question about server interfaces or performance. In the future, I may approach the developers of popular client-side features myself, with a proposition to bring their feature to a wider audience. Lupin in particular is on my list, although he may not know it yet.
So although we may not be getting dynamic editor lists on edit pages any time soon, all is not lost in the realm of collaborative development. There are lots of exciting opportunities.
-- Tim Starling