Timezone-appropriate greeting, wikitech!
I've been working on a new extension, BetaFeatures[0]. A lot of you have
heard about it through the grapevine, and for the rest of you, consider
this an announcement for the developers. :)
The basic idea of the extension is to enable features to be enabled
experimentally on a wiki, on an opt-in basis, instead of just launching
them immediately, sometimes hidden behind a checkbox that has no special
meaning in the interface. It also has a lot of cool design work on top
of it, courtesy of Jared and May of the WMF design team, so thanks very
much to them. There are still a few[1] things[2] we have to build out,
but overall the extension is looking pretty nice so far.
I am of course always soliciting advice about the extension in general,
but in particular, we have a request for a feature for the fields that
has been giving me a bit of trouble. We want to put a count of users that
have each preference enabled on the page, but we don't want to, say, crash
the site with long SQL queries. Our theories thus far have been:
* Count all rows (grouped) in user_properties that correspond to properties
registered through the BetaFeatures hook. Potentially a lot of rows,
but we have at least decided to use an "IN" query, as opposed to
"LIKE",
which would have been an outright disaster. Obviously: Caching. Caching
more would lead to more of the below issues, though.
* Fire off a job, every once in a while, to update the counts in a table
that the extension registers. Downsides: Less granular, sort of fakey
(since one of the subfeatures will be incrementing the count, live,
when a user enables a preference). Upside: Faster.
* Update counts with simple increment/decrement queries. Upside: Blazingly
faster. Potential downside: Might get out of sync. Maybe fire off jobs
even less frequently, to ensure it's not always out of date in weird
ways?
So my question is, which of these are best, and are there even better
ways out there? I love doing things right the first time, hence my asking.
[0]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BetaFeatures
[1]
https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/multimedia/cards/2
[2]
https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/multimedia/cards/21
P.S. One of the first features that we'll launch with this framework is
the "MultimediaViewer" extension which is also under[3] development[4]
as we speak. Exciting times for the Multimedia team!
[3]
https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/multimedia/cards/8
[4]
https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/multimedia/cards/12
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist