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.