Hi all,
I'm in the process of developing a media handling extension for MediaWiki that will allow users with WebGL-enabled browsers to manipulate 3D models of large biological molecules, like proteins and DNA. I'm new to MediaWiki development, and I've got some questions about how I should go forward with development of this extension if I want to ultimately get it into official Wikimedia MediaWiki deployments.
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Awesome!
- PDB (.pdb) is a niche file type that has a non-standard MIME type of
"chemical/x-pdb". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Data_Bank_%28file_format%29 for more. To upload files with this MIME type, in my local MediaWiki deployment I had to relax a constraint in the 'image' database table on what MIME types are allowed. If I recall correctly there was an enum that allowed only a small handful of MIME types to be uploaded. I also had to adjust some other configuration settings in Apache and MediaWiki so that .pdb files were properly handled. Would these things be doable in an official WMF deployment? If not, what are some possible workarounds?
This is totally the least of your concerns regarding this extension, but wouldn't the mime type "model/x-pdb" be more appropriate (or failing that "application/x-pdb". But pdb sounds like a model format). I'm not sure why a non-standard major mime type is needed. Then again I guess we aren't the people who determine the mime type people use.
I also think static images would probably be the best fallback if WebGL is unavailable.
ImageMagick seems like it might also have the ability to programmatically autocrop an image and add a certain padding around the subject.
ImageMagick would definitely be good since its already in use. I know netpbm programs can also programatically crop things, but image magick is definitely the best choice if possible.
-bawolff