The first step is onboarding developers who are dedicated and willing to help. In the meantime we can establish a road map. With 6 years of working professionally with a large development team, and 10 with the agile development process, I'd like to assume the role of project management if you are willing to have me as such. I'm not going to be able to do much development anyway (not a PHP guy), but could likely help with debugging if I get the environment running locally. Let me know what you think... I'm certainly not trying to take full control or anything, so please don't misinterpret. We are a consensus-driven team and we all have the same goals, we just need to get a little organized about it. I think this would be my best contribution.

So that's me... now, about the game plan...

I am asking prospective developers to email us, with a subject line "user name - php developer" or "user name - sysadmin" or whatever. This dedicates a single thread to each candidate and away from the chaos of a wiki talk page. We can together discuss if given their background and experience if they are a good fit for the team.
Our new developers should first familiarize themselves with the original codebase and attempt to get it running in their own local environment. This will allow them to grasp basic integration with Wikimedia servers, whether through the API or direct database connection. They'll need to understand the schema of the database tables we will be querying. The code will be rewritten, but the principles behind will be quite similar. I think seeing the original code in action will be a good first step.
We as a team need to figure out what our new environment is going to be, ASAP. I say the latest version of PHP and CakePHP as our framework, along with whatever modules you say we need. Let's try to establish that sooner than later, and get familiarized with it so we can help the new developers get started on it as well.
Once we've got our MVC framework figured out, let's get the basic structure in place... the interface, styling, I assume there will a general layout shared amongst all views, with the nav/footer, etc (keeping things DRY). With the styling and basic markup in place, developers can focus on the PHP stuff which is what actually needs to be rewritten.
Start assigning tasks. We'll need to figure out the best practices for our framework, but I believe it would involve creating the models (User, Article, etc) which is shared amongst all the tools. From there we can divvy out work, where a developer would not be working on more than a single tool at a time.

How does that sound? This is a rough outline, but does it sound feasible/practical? Or are we getting in over our heads? Sometimes it's better if a single dev get the basic framework and structure down, and then we let the devs work on the individual tools. If you can give me the OK on this, I'll start creating tasks on Phabricator, starting with studying how CakePHP works and it's best practices. From there I can construct a road map document, along with another on-boarding document with procedures for our new developers to follow as they get started.

It's a big holiday weekend here in the US, so I may be less responsive. However come Monday and moving forward I'd like to dedicate myself to helping organizing and oversee this project. I hope this initiative is well-received, as the least I can say is that with new developers and devops we are going to need more clear, established management. If this is put in place I think you'll find video conferencing unnecessary.

-Leon

On 3 July 2015 at 08:34, Eugene Lee <leee@mit.edu> wrote:

o/ Kudpung,

For what its worth, my personal and professional experience suggests phone conferencing works well only people maintainers schedules coincide. Email works especially well when people are out of sync, and gives time for email senders to think things through.

Regarding T13's participation: I personally was against this but was told since disciplinary action was only taken on enwiki it would not apply to his work on xtools. I definitely am uncomfortable given the nature of his actions that led to the ArbCom decision, but since others on the xtools team was okay with it, I refrained from going further since I'm the newest team member on the block.

Unsure what people are talking about re: messes, so I'll refrain from that.

--leee

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 2:47 AM, Chris <cs@edubkk.org> wrote:
I’ve only been following this email list for a day or two and already I see that the biggest problem is not getting the tools up and running or porting existing ttools from other wikis to our corner of Labs, but one of organisation/coordination.
I do not believe that trying to manage somthieng as important as this can be done with the back and forth of email or even on IRC.

The greatest steps forward I have achieved for Wikipedia, such as the cleanup of the massive IEP problem, and the development of the NPP suite, were all done over Skype conferencing. There is even better face-2-face multi-person conferencing available nowadays, may I respectfully suggest that the team look into this in order to save time.

Also, if T13 is still one of the participants here, I’m not happy with the arrangement.

In the meantime, I will try contacting some people I know at the Foundation in an attempt to get them to clean up any mess they are directly responsible for so that there will at least be a stable server to work on.

Thanks for listening.

Kudpung

On 3Jul, 2015, at 09:52, Maximilian Doerr <maximilian.doerr@gmail.com> wrote:

Great. VirtualBox won’t install. I’ve tried 3 times now, but it keeps giving me an unexpected error occurred. :/

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
Mailing List Moderator

From: xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of MusikAnimal
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 10:30 PM
To: Discussion list for xTools
Subject: Re: [xTools] xTools is not movable

I would go with the virtual box idea. The file system is essentially an NFS mount (as I understand it) so you could still use your IDE or what have you, you'd just would run the application in VirtualBox.

On 2 July 2015 at 22:25, Maximilian Doerr <maximilian.doerr@gmail.com> wrote:
Because I want to see what’s broken on articleinfo by stepping through the code. Plus. The code needs to be portable right?

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
Mailing List Moderator

From: xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of L235 Wikipedia
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 10:23 PM

To: Discussion list for xTools
Subject: Re: [xTools] xTools is not movable

May I ask why you're trying to do it on your Windows computer rather than creating a test instance on Labs (where we'll be deploying it anyways), making it work there, and then remembering how you did it, writing a documentation file, and destroying the instance? (Or any other way that doesn't involve doing it on Windows?)

Thanks,
L235
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:L235

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Maximilian Doerr <maximilian.doerr@gmail.com> wrote:
So exactly how do you set up redis to work with PHP on Windows ß(Please don’t hate me for that)? I’m totally unfamiliar with redis. It’s the primary holdup I’m facing to getting the tool to work on my computer.

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
Mailing List Moderator

From: xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of ShoeMaker Royality
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 9:49 PM

To: Discussion list for xTools
Subject: Re: [xTools] xTools is not movable

I'm aware of what's there. I'll work on getting ainfo up in our new home probably Monday or Tuesday. Best I can do between school and holiday weekend family RL stuffs. T13
On Jul 2, 2015 9:42 PM, "Maximilian Doerr" <maximilian.doerr@gmail.com> wrote:
T13, that was before Hedonil touched the code. There’s all kinds of hardcoded paths and webproxy usages specific to toollabs that I don’t know what to do with.

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
Mailing List Moderator

From: xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:xtools-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Eugene Lee
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 9:23 PM
To: Discussion list for xTools
Subject: Re: [xTools] xTools is not movable

Ah yeup!

I'll coordinate with you over IRC in about 10-20 minutes.

--leee

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 9:21 PM, ShoeMaker Royality <legend.of.the.red.dragon@gmail.com> wrote:
It is movable because we kind of did it before with moving to xstools. I'll see what I can do after the holiday weekend when I get home unless someone else gets to it first.
On Jul 2, 2015 9:19 PM, "Maximilian Doerr" <maximilian.doerr@gmail.com> wrote:
I’ve spent nearly a day today get at least one tool to even load on my computer, mainly revision history statistics tool. I’ve had absolutely no luck getting it to work. Unless someone else would like to try, I’m declaring xTools to be unmovable and therefore cannot be moved to xtools.wmflabs.org with our dedicated environment to stabilize xTools. L If no one objects, I would like to move to plan B and get wikihistory temporarily ported to the new environment or the toollabs environment as a temporary replacement to the broken articleinfo tool. That way we at least have the important tools working again for the time being. We should consider moving straight to building a rewrite, one that’s maintainable, portable, and most importantly stable.

Elee, if no one objects to this plan, would you object to rebuilding the instances, at least the dev ones, with the newest available Linux version and the latest PHP version?

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
Mailing List Moderator

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