Over at the wikien list a small flame war between PHP and perl, resulted in a bunch of people all saying that they would love to contribute to mediawiki development, however do not have the technical know-how to do so. And thus was born the idea of a group PHP tutorial with the aim of bringing people who dont know PHP up to a level where they can do menial coding, simple bug fixes etc. for mediawiki, freeing up time that the more skilled developers could use on something else, and hopefully (after the internship of doing easy stuff) become full blooded developers. So what they are looking for is someone who has a good knowledge of PHP to act as thier guide. <uncle sam voice> IS THAT PERSON YOU!?!?!?!?! </uncle sam voice>
hopefully, [[w:User:The bellman]] rjs
Robin Shannon wrote:
Over at the wikien list a small flame war between PHP and perl, resulted in a bunch of people all saying that they would love to contribute to mediawiki development, however do not have the technical know-how to do so. And thus was born the idea of a group PHP tutorial with the aim of bringing people who dont know PHP up to a level where they can do menial coding, simple bug fixes etc. for mediawiki, freeing up time that the more skilled developers could use on something else, and hopefully (after the internship of doing easy stuff) become full blooded developers. So what they are looking for is someone who has a good knowledge of PHP to act as thier guide. <uncle sam voice> IS THAT PERSON YOU!?!?!?!?! </uncle sam voice>
Well yes, it probably is me, since I was responsible for starting that flame war by declaring that people should learn PHP so that they can contribute to MediaWiki. However, help would be appreciated, and if someone else wants to organise it, that's fine by me. I'm going to be fairly busy for the next week or so, so if no-one else steps forward, this might have to progress slowly. If there were lots of developers with lots of free time on their hands, my appeal would not have been so desparate.
-- Tim Starling
It occured to me this would make an excellent O'Reilly/Wikibook and kill two birds with one stone.
"Learning PHP by example, with MediaWiki"
You get the book, and a cover disk with a snapshot of the mediawiki software. It could be a "live" bootable cd, with everything setup and running - or just a specific version of the code.
Then, run through the basics of PHP pointing people at specific pages/code in mediawiki as an example.
The reader would learn about PHP, and get a fully functioning advanced wiki for their own use. Plus the knowledge to tweak it to their needs.
Wikipedia would gain exposure, and if it was published, possibly some revenue to fund other work. Plus an easy way for developers to get involved.
Sadly my PHP skills are rubbish, and I too don't have the time, so just throwing in a suggestion. Another take on the same theme would be if someone like O'Reilly were to be interested, they might fund an estalished/star PHP hacker to write the book - which would for a brief window bring in some top-rated skills specifically focused on making the code easier/cleaner (not that I'm suggesting it ain't already ...).
On Mon, 2004-29-11 at 13:36 +0000, Minty wrote:
"Learning PHP by example, with MediaWiki"
/me spits out his coffee
~ESP
On Nov 29, 2004, at 5:49 AM, Evan Prodromou wrote:
On Mon, 2004-29-11 at 13:36 +0000, Minty wrote:
"Learning PHP by example, with MediaWiki"
/me spits out his coffee
Think of the children... won't anybody think of the children?!
In all seriousness, MediaWiki is not the prettiest or best PHP codebase I've seen. It's also far from the worst, but this is small consolation if you've ever lurked in comp.lang.php and seen the horrors people post there. ;)
The web is full of PHP tutorials. There might even be some good ones out there. The best way to get into PHP in my experience is to just dive in.
The online manual at www.php.net is generally easy to search (at lest for functions -- it can be harder to look up things like constants or unusual keywords). The language itself will be pretty familiar to someone who's dabbled in C-like languages or Perl. There are gotchas (as there are in any language) which you're either going to stumble or on someone more experienced is going to point out to you.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Minty wrote:
Sadly my PHP skills are rubbish, and I too don't have the time, so just throwing in a suggestion. Another take on the same theme would be if someone like O'Reilly were to be interested, they might fund an estalished/star PHP hacker to write the book - which would for a brief window bring in some top-rated skills specifically focused on making the code easier/cleaner (not that I'm suggesting it ain't already ...).
I too have no knowledge of PHP, but it seems to me that a good starting point would be the Wikibooks project on PHP. Supporting our own family should be our first instinct.
Ec
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