In my view, if a Labs tool is a success, it should be written as a wiki Extension and deployed to relevant wikis. What you're saying essentially means that there is a need to make the wiki truly extensible without much pain.
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OOjs_UI for example, but people insist it's not ready for production and is internal to Visual Editor folks. Quoting James:
OOUI is not stable enough to encourage people to use it full-tilt (we make breaking changes every week or so), so this [writing documentation for it] feels very premature --Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
- I believe Wikibase (Wikidata) is meant to make database operations easier. I have no idea what database toolkits they provide (you may want to check with wikidata-l).
--
svetlana
Petr Bena
benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
> 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?
>
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