For this week's triage, I worked with Tomasz Finc and Patrick Reilly to focus on the new MobileFrontend extension. I also held it a few hours earlier and, as a result had participation from developers farther east.
Tomasz was especially interested in getting participation from non-WMF developers and as an incentive, he went through the bugs and tagged the easy ones that would be a good starting point for developers interested in starting work on the MobileFrontend. You can see the complete list of bugs in this week's etherpad here: http://hexm.de/5x
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/24359 Adding an "e-mail to friends" link to MobileFrontend
Bryan suggested this one was similar to requests that had been made on the main site in the past and I initially closed as such -- a duplicate of "mail this article to someone feature" like Bug #227.
Both Tomasz and MzMcBride objected, though, and re-opened the bug.
Part of Brion's concern for WONTFIXing 227 was that it "opens extra spamming opportunities" which I'm concerned with as well. I updated the bug with some steps we should take to minimize spamming concerns.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22659 Give projects the opportunity to add mobile specific JS/CSS
Amir showed up to ask about device-specific CSS and making them available to wiki admins (e.g. Mediawiki:Android.css). Patrick said that right now their were only two hard-coded CSS style-sheets (.../iphone.css and .../android.css). I updated the bug with the requested information.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30118 Custom project icon in MobileFrontend extension
John Du Hart saw this bug in the list and volunteered to take it on. As of Thursday night, it looks like he has gotten pretty far along if not complete.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28515 - Dynamic fonts support in mobile gateway
Amir raised the issue of webfonts for mobile. He also pointed out that many mobile devices don't support web fonts at all. While Santosh has done a lot of work on the webfonts extension, this doesn't help. Amir speculated that the the webfonts extension could render images of the page with the proper fonts and send the images to the phone. We'll need to work on with Santosh on this.
After this we got people testing the Mobile frontend bugs that had already been entered. Tomasz and and Patrick used the opportunity to have people with different handhelds test the bugs. It is my impression that there is a bit more variety with mobile devices right now then there is with desktops, so this was a great opportunity to test the new mobile site on a variety of devices and confirm problems or fixes. After passing around the OptIn link (http://tinyurl.com/woptin) Tomasz asked people to check out the following bugs:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28181 - Request for Kindle to be redirected to the mobile site
This was one that we didn't get to test, but I'll be sure to request that Kindle owners (and users of other mobile devices) show up for our next mobile triage. We'll need you!
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30293 - "View this page on regular Wikipedia" disables mobile redirect
While testing this bug, we didn't see it and closed the bug. However, I discovered https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30458 "mobile link to view images site is flaky" and got someone else to confirm it.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30356 - New gateway has broken layout for opera mini
After some testing -- Thanks, Niklas! -- This looked like an intermittent problem since we couldn't reproduce it.
We hope to do one of these mobile triages every month and, for future ones it would be awesome if we could have Kindles, iPads, and maybe even Nooks a well as Blackberries, Androids, iPhones and even Nokia phones.
Thanks for all the help this time!
Mark.
Thanks for the detailed write up Mark.
--tomasz
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mhershberger@wikimedia.org wrote:
For this week's triage, I worked with Tomasz Finc and Patrick Reilly to focus on the new MobileFrontend extension. I also held it a few hours earlier and, as a result had participation from developers farther east.
Tomasz was especially interested in getting participation from non-WMF developers and as an incentive, he went through the bugs and tagged the easy ones that would be a good starting point for developers interested in starting work on the MobileFrontend. You can see the complete list of bugs in this week's etherpad here: http://hexm.de/5x
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/24359 Adding an "e-mail to friends" link to MobileFrontend
Bryan suggested this one was similar to requests that had been made on the main site in the past and I initially closed as such -- a duplicate of "mail this article to someone feature" like Bug #227.
Both Tomasz and MzMcBride objected, though, and re-opened the bug.
Part of Brion's concern for WONTFIXing 227 was that it "opens extra spamming opportunities" which I'm concerned with as well. I updated the bug with some steps we should take to minimize spamming concerns.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22659 Give projects the opportunity to add mobile specific JS/CSS
Amir showed up to ask about device-specific CSS and making them available to wiki admins (e.g. Mediawiki:Android.css). Patrick said that right now their were only two hard-coded CSS style-sheets (.../iphone.css and .../android.css). I updated the bug with the requested information.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30118 Custom project icon in MobileFrontend extension
John Du Hart saw this bug in the list and volunteered to take it on. As of Thursday night, it looks like he has gotten pretty far along if not complete.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28515 - Dynamic fonts support in mobile gateway
Amir raised the issue of webfonts for mobile. He also pointed out that many mobile devices don't support web fonts at all. While Santosh has done a lot of work on the webfonts extension, this doesn't help. Amir speculated that the the webfonts extension could render images of the page with the proper fonts and send the images to the phone. We'll need to work on with Santosh on this.
After this we got people testing the Mobile frontend bugs that had already been entered. Tomasz and and Patrick used the opportunity to have people with different handhelds test the bugs. It is my impression that there is a bit more variety with mobile devices right now then there is with desktops, so this was a great opportunity to test the new mobile site on a variety of devices and confirm problems or fixes. After passing around the OptIn link (http://tinyurl.com/woptin) Tomasz asked people to check out the following bugs:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28181 - Request for Kindle to be redirected to the mobile site
This was one that we didn't get to test, but I'll be sure to request that Kindle owners (and users of other mobile devices) show up for our next mobile triage. We'll need you!
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30293 - "View this page on regular Wikipedia" disables mobile redirect
While testing this bug, we didn't see it and closed the bug. However, I discovered https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30458 "mobile link to view images site is flaky" and got someone else to confirm it.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30356 - New gateway has broken layout for opera mini
After some testing -- Thanks, Niklas! -- This looked like an intermittent problem since we couldn't reproduce it.
We hope to do one of these mobile triages every month and, for future ones it would be awesome if we could have Kindles, iPads, and maybe even Nooks a well as Blackberries, Androids, iPhones and even Nokia phones.
Thanks for all the help this time!
Mark.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org