On Jun 30, 2014, at 5:09 PM, Adam Wight <awight@wikimedia.orgmailto:awight@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi, Fundraising would like the ability to snapshot or retrieve a CentralNotice banner exactly as it was rendered at an earlier time, including the old revisions of templates, which is tricky and AFAICT not supported by MediaWiki-core.
I know this issue has come up before but it looks like development is external and has died out. The most relevant code seems to be Extension:BackwardsTimeTravel, which adds some expensive-looking hook callbacks, and Extension:Memento, which is too far into the future and amends how HTTP operates.
The Memento extension does sound like it will solve your issue. We created datetime negotiation to solve problems like this for the Internet as a whole.
The Memento extension renders past versions of pages, including templates. We also added an experimental feature to the extension that allows it to render past versions of images when you visit an oldid page, it can be added by installing the extension and setting $wgMementoTimeNegotiationForThumbnails = true. The image functionality is based off of the oldid revision date, so it does not depend on the HTTP headers.
To use the full features of Memento, you can install the Chrome Extension[1]. This will work with the MediaWiki Extension to render the past version of the page.
We documented the issues (and solutions) in rendering past versions of pages at WikiConference USA 2014 [2].
Memento uses existing HTTP features, so it doesn’t alter HTTP like SPDY. Installing the Memento Extension won’t affect any existing users, but will provide Memento users with some added functionality.
We’re a little curious: what did you mean by “is too far into the future”?
[1] http://bit.ly/memento-for-chrome [2] http://www.slideshare.net/shawnmjones/reconstructing-the-past-with-media-wik...
Shawn M. Jones Graduate Research Assistant Department of Computer Science Old Dominion University
Email: sjone@cs.odu.edumailto:sjone@cs.odu.edu Research group: http://ws-dl.blogspot.com Twitter: @shawnmjones