Dear list members,
I am pleased to announce the release of WP-MIRROR 0.7.
0) SUMMARY
The main design objective was this: RENDERING.
A page rendered by the mirror is now very similar to the same page rendered by the WMF server. Indeed, not only do pages look almost the same, they now *behave* almost the same (e.g. editting, searching, user account creation, beta features).
Most of this improvement was accomplished by packaging `mediawiki 1.23' and dozens of its extensions including: EasyTimeline, Math, Mobile Frontend, Score, Scribunto, Timed Media Handler, Titlekey, Universal Language Selector, Visual Editor, and Wikidata.
A mirror of the `wikidata wiki' is now built `out-of-the-box', and provides data to the other wikis (e.g. for populating infoboxes). Mirrors of `simplewiki' and `simplewiktionary' are also build `out-of-the-box' as before.
1) PACKAGING
Dependencies: Four new DEB packages were prepared as dependencies for WP-MIRROR 0.7:
o mediawiki-mwxml2sql_0.0.2-2_amd64.deb: contains an upgrade of `mwxml2sql' suitable for processing XML dumps for mediawiki 1.23. o wp-mirror-mediawiki_1.23-1_all.deb: contains git branch wmf/1.23wmf14. o wp-mirror-mediawiki-extensions_1.23-1_all.deb: contains 47 extensions from git branch wmf/1.23wmf14 (except for the `Wikidata' extension which is from git branch mw1.23-wmf11) o wp-mirror-mediawiki-extensions-math-texvc_1.23-1_amd64.deb: contains programs needed to render MathJax.
Testing: The DEB package for WP-MIRROR 0.7 works `out-of-the-box' with no user configuration for the following distributions:
o Debian GNU/Linux 7.4 (wheezy) with backports. This has been tested on both a host machine, and on a virtual machine.
2) INSTALLATION
WP-MIRROR 0.7 is now available in the form of a Debian package repository.
3) USE
Virtual Hosts: Browsing of mirrored wikis is done via virtual hosts with names like http://simple.wikipedia.site/, http://simple.wiktionary.site/, and http://www.wikidata.site/. Simply take the URL that WMF offers, and replace `.org' with `.site'.
3) FURTHER INFO
Project Home Page: http://www.nongnu.org/wp-mirror/ has been updated. Please browse there if you are interested in trying WP-MIRROR.
Documentation has been updated. There is a new section on virtual machines; and there is a new section on the `mediawiki' extensions that were packaged for this release.
Feedback is welcome.
4) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank several people for providing valuable assistance.
o Jason Cooper - for recommendations on DEB packaging, repository design, and hosting; and for getting me interested in virtual machines, which are now part of my tool chain (this is how I test that WP-MIRROR 0.7 works `out-of-the-box' on a clean install of Debian 7.4). o Kevin Day - for providing IPv6 support at <ftpmirror.your.org>, which is highly appreciated by those of us on IPv6 only networks. o Frederico Leva (Nemo) - for advice that helped track down a bug with XML dump importation. o Gnosygnu - for many pointers on Wikidata, Scribunto, database schema changes, and XOWA thumb dumps. o Guy Castagnoli - for performing a code review of WP-MIRROR 0.6, which led to numerous improvements in WP-MIRROR 0.7; and for spending an evening with me discussing a wide range of topics including: news of other offline projects, showing me how pages are rendered on his mobile devices, and starting a list of feature requests for a future WP-MIRROR 0.8 (requests for features including parsoid, importation of daily dumps, generation of thumb dumps and ZIM files).
Sincerely Yours, Dr. Kent L. Miller