As you might know, we have been making significant improvements to the beta cluster in labs[1]. I wanted to point out two developments of the last few days that I think are important milestones.

First, the TimedMediaHandler extension that we've been testing in the beta commons wiki for quite some time has moved off of the the beta cluster and is now being installed on test2wiki in preparation for a production deployment. Much work has gone into TMH, and this move would not have been possible without the extensive improvements to beta commons to support TMH development and testing.

Second, there is a working, testable version of the new Article Feedback Tool Version 5 on the beta enwiki right now. This is the first major user-facing extension under development to be deployed to the beta cluster. The beta cluster will give us a much more sophisticated test and development environment for such extensions (and their combinations) in the very near future.

Versions of Mediawiki core and extensions are deployed to the beta cluster directly from our git repository[2]. This process should be automated in the very near future. An issue with the shared file system GlusterFS has prevented any easy or convenient automated deployment, but our GlusterFS system is being upgraded to the latest version (pretty much any minute now) which should make deployment directly from git much more convenient.

Thanks to Antoine Musso, Faidon Liambotis, Jan Gerber, Michael Dale, and Matthias Mullie for all your work and all your help. The labs beta cluster is becoming an important part our software development environment.

-Chris

[1] http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page for example [2] https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployment/Overview#Configure