Hi,
It's been some time since we launched tool labs and there is
incredible number of tools now. They all however have 2 major
problems. Every tool has own, different layout / css style (which may
be confusing the users of these tools) and every developer of these
tools probably have to reinvent a wheel at some point as they all have
to do some common tool setup - eg. they have to create some basic php
skeleton that would access wikimedia resources, from databases,
memcache, reddis to API's and so on.
What about creating some common uniform framework in php that, just as
pywikipediabot that is used to create bots, would be used to create
web-based tools. So that maintainer of a tool would just fork or clone
this framework and wouldn't have to spend their time creating
functions that would generate html pages with wikimedia uniform style
(similar to how vector looks, for example, or just any uniform style,
so that tools would look similar), access wikimedia databases, OAuth,
ldap, API...
I believe it would not just make creation of new tools incredibly
simple, but it would also make all tools have consistent look and
feel, and thus improve the end user experience. What you think? Is
there someone who would like to work on that?