Hello everyone,
I'd like to get your opinions and critique on my very first MediaWiki extension, which, I hope, will be helpful to other developers.
I noticed that there's no easy way of seeing if extensions that we have installed on our MediaWiki require update, and there are even some extensions that get so little regular attention that when they do get updated, there's no real way of knowing it (unless we check specifically).
It can be annoying when encountering problems or bugs, and then discovering that one of our extensions (probably the one we least expected) actually has an update that fixed this bug.
So, I thought to try and solve this issue with my extension. Since MediaWiki's changes are submitted through gerrit, I thought I'd take advantage of that and perform a remote check to see if there are any new commits that appeared in any of the extensions since they were installed.
How it works, briefly: the system compares the local repository date to the list of latest commits on gerrit's repo for the extension to see how many commits a user is behind on. If the user doesn't have a local git for the extension (or if they downloaded the extension manually) the system falls back to testing the local modification date for the files. It's not perfect, but it can give people a general idea of whether or not their extensions need some TLC.
The extension is available on GitHub: https://github.com/mooeypoo/MediaWiki-ExtensionStatus along with screenshots and a short possible todo list.
There's a list of things I plan to try and improve, some of them are meant to make the lives of newbie developers (like me!) easier, but I'd love it if I could get feedback from you all and see if you think this could be helpful to you. Would you like to see anything else in it? Do you think I'm in the right direction or am I doing it all wrong?
Be merciless! Okay, maybe not *completely* merciless, but please don't hold back. This is my very first extension, and beyond wanting to make this a good extension, I also want to get a sense of whether or not I got into MW development right, and if there is anything I should have done (or be doing) differently.
Please let me know what you think!
Moriel (mooeypoo)