Brianna Laugher schrieb:
Hi,
I was thinking last night that it might be cool if there was a kind of "template repository" for people to copy templates from for their own MediaWiki. Copying them from Wikipedia etc while possible tends to be very nasty and/or ugly due to extreme nestedness.
Yes, indeed. A collection of simple, nice and clean templates, for people to import, would be quite nice.
Actually, with the Help: pages on mediawiki.org, I had an idea that these would eventually ship by default with MediaWiki. Is that still the plan? I think it's a good idea - plenty of people may never come back to mediawiki.org after installing, and it's just so convenient to already have those pages in your wiki. And the special:export instructions are ok but kind of a pain (you have to upload the images yourself? oh and enable SVGs? joy).
It would make sense to make a Bundeling/download service for this kind of stuff, based on a category that collects all pages and images of such a set. Similar to what we now have for extensions with Special:ExtensionDistributor -- perhaps make it Special:BundleExport or some such.
SVG should be allowed for upload per default, if the installer detects an appropriate renderer. That would be nice.
Could an extension avoid the need for manually uploading images? (Or, is there any prospect that files will work properly with special:export?)
I suppose one sane way of doing this would be to make a (pk)zip or tar(gz) archive of a) an xml-dump of the appropriate pages and b) the images used in them. Writing a shell script to unpack the bundle, and the run importImages.php on the images and importDump.php on the XML would be trivial enough. Writing Special:ImportBundle would be nicer, and not too terribly complex either, I suppose.
On a related note, see http://brightbyte.de/page/Extending_MediaWiki%27s_dump_format for some thoughts about things missing from the current XML dump format.
-- daniel