On 06/03/2015 08:07 AM, This, that and the other wrote:
Thanks for thinking of tools like Twinkle!
I wonder why this couldn't be implemented directly as an API action,
though.
We considered this (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T59989) and
decided against it.
Since the internals are different (Flow posts are fully versioned, but
they are not 'pages' at the MW core level), we were concerned that the
shim would be leaky (responses would be kinda sorta right, but not when
you did something deeper, and error responses would probably be even
wronger).
So there is of course a public documented API
(
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=flow%20new-topic)
for creating new Flow topics, but it is not the same API as for posting
sections (nor is there a shim).
That would probably be helpful to bots and
non-JS-based tools,
as well as to Twinkle itself (since we use our own XML-based MediaWiki
API wrapper for consistent error handling and user experience).
For bots, Alexander Jones is working on
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67119 to add Flow support to
Pywikibot (John Vandenberg and I are mentoring).
Not all bots use Pywikibot, but that should lead the way and other
library and bot developers can learn from the solutions implemented there.
No one has an obligation to use MessagePoster. There are other ways to
solve the problem (basically, check the content model of the target page
then do what you want).
For many developers, I think MessagePoster will be pretty simple. For
Twinkle, you'll have to decide whether it can fit into your architecture.
Best,
Matt Flaschen