MediaWiki Updates

[Marius Strom]

Ok, guys – Steve gave me admin privs to the wiki, so I took a stab at installing a few of the extensions people asked for:

• ShareThis
• FCKeditor
• RenameUser

I did not make updates to the Math extensions (that requires installing stuff on the base system; I’ll leave that to Steve), nor did I install the Video extension (which hasn’t been updated since MediaWiki 1.6 era).

 

Let me know if anything else is needed.

[Marius Strom]

Oh, did anyone have the logo of the old site handy?  Or any graphically inclined folks out there that could piece together a logo for the site?

[Sudhir Desai]

I just went through the tarball of the old wiki, and was not able to
find the logo (i looked for a vanagonwiki.jpg/.png/.gif, and then a
file with "logo" in its name).

Sudhir

[Mike South]

How about a favicon.ico ?

mike

[Sudhir Desai]

I will check, but I'm 90% sure it was a jpg/bmp/png.

sudhir

On May 10, 2010 9:12 AM, "Mike South" <mso...@gmail.com> wrote:

How about a favicon.ico ?

mike

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Sudhir Desai <sudhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

> I just went throu...

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

Sudhir Desai wrote:
> I will check, but I'm 90% sure it was a jpg/bmp/png.

The logo is going to be a jpg/png or similar, as Sudhir suggests.
Favicon.ico is for web site. I make the old logo, I may well have it on
my hard drive, I'll look.
--
Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott
84 Westfalia: Mellow Yellow ("The Electrical Banana")
74 Westrailia: (Ladybug Trailer company, San Juan Capistrano, Calif.)
Bend, OR
KG6RCR

[Steve Williams]

At 05:13 AM 5/10/2010, Sudhir Desai wrote:
>I just went through the tarball of the old wiki, and was not able to
>find the logo (i looked for a vanagonwiki.jpg/.png/.gif, and then a
>file with "logo" in its name).

Darn those case-sensistive filenames! I found it as:

VWikiLogo.png

So now we have a logo.

No favicon, however. The Internet Archive shows the old wiki pointed
to /favicon.ico, but Mediawiki does that even if that file isn't
present. For now, I've removed the favicon, but if someone will
contribute one, we can turn it back on.

[Sudhir Desai]

what are the required dimensions and color-depth of the .ico file?

[Steve Williams]

It turns out the Internet Archive did capture some articles. For
example, I found two versions of "Westfalia Curtains Sewing
Information" from May and June, 2008. Here's the later version:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080612052906/http://vanagonwiki.net/index.php/Westfalia_Curtains_Sewing_Information

Most of the archived pages are just Mediawiki boilerplate, but if
you're willing, go through all of them to see which ones are useful:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/vanagonwiki.net/*

[Mike South]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Sudhir Desai <sudhir...@gmail.com> wrote:

what are the required dimensions and color-depth of the .ico file?

http://www.winterdrache.de/freeware/png2ico/favicon.html

says it should be 16x16 and at most 16 colors.  And, since it's on the internet, it must be true.

mike

[Sudhir Desai]

of course. along with steve winwood producing rap musicals, and
micheal jackson preparing for a comeback tour.

;)

[Mike South]

Note that we have

 http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Westy_curtains

on the new one.

(Don't want anyone duplicating effort.)

mike

[Sudhir Desai]

Steve, would you be able to send me the vanagonwiki main png? i can
resize it and clean it up here at work (gimp machine).

Sudhir

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:48, Steve Williams <s...@sbw.org> wrote:

[Steve Williams]

At 08:11 AM 5/10/2010, Sudhir Desai wrote:
>Steve, would you be able to send me the vanagonwiki main png?

You can download it from the server:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/skins/common/images/VWikiLogo.png

[Steve Williams]

Hmmm... One reason the wiki isn't in the Internet Archive is that it
appears Mediawiki's default robots.txt file makes all articles
off-limits to robots.

I've changed the robots.txt file to something more appropriate. It
allows robots to crawl articles, but not administrivia:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/robots.txt

[Mike South]

Wow--is mind reading a feature we should come to expect?

I had earlier noticed all the tantalizing hits in google with no cache.  I figured there must have been something disallowing it and thought "we need to make sure we don't do that with the new one".

That seems like a weird default for a wiki.

mike

[Peter DiFalco]

The default is to let you develop your site in relative obscurity if not privacy, without your messy planning and false starts becoming part of the internet's blooper reel. Sounds like a good place to start, and then you can pull back the curtain and let in the spiders when you're ready.

-Peter

[Steve Williams]

At 09:22 PM 5/9/2010, Marius Strom wrote:
>I did not make updates to the Math extensions (that requires

>installing stuff on the base system; I’ll leave that to Steve) ...

Heh. After about four hours of fiddling, we now have math installed. Example:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Test

I've tried before to get the math extension working on other
Mediawiki sites without any success. Installing the required tools
doesn't work, as some stuff is left out, at least on FreeBSD.

I finally got it working using this approach:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_FreeBSD#teTeX

[Sudhir Desai]

and there was much rejoicing \o\ /o/ \o\ /o/

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

Steve Williams wrote:

> Heh. After about four hours of fiddling, we now have math installed.

The new wiki is shaping up to be fancier digs than the old one. I just
have to find it in myself to start my articles all over again. Why did
the stupid wayback machine only archive the curtains patterns pages and
no other articles.

Stupid, stupid wayback machine.

[Mike South]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" <camping...@gmail.com> wrote:

Steve Williams wrote:

Heh.  After about four hours of fiddling, we now have math installed.  

The new wiki is shaping up to be fancier digs than the old one. I just have to find it in myself to start my articles all over again. Why did the stupid wayback machine only archive the curtains patterns pages and no other articles.

Stupid, stupid wayback machine.

It was probably the stupid robots.txt.  Google didn't cache it either--I think google always caches unless you tell it not to.

Sad, but at least we have rectified it for this go-round.

mike

mike

[Steve Williams]

At 02:14 PM 5/10/2010, Mike South wrote:
>On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"
><<mailto:camping...@gmail.com>camping...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Stupid, stupid wayback machine.
>
>It was probably the stupid robots.txt.

Yes, please don't think ill of the Internet Archive.

The folks behind the Internet Archive are selfless, generous
people. The services they provide are incredibly valuable to global culture.

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

They are using their power for Evil, and not Good. How else to explain
the fact that instead of preserving my breathless prose, they instead
saved an article about curtains? If that's isn't proof of malicious
intent then I don't know what is.

<walks off, all in a huff>

[Mike South]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"
<camping...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Williams wrote:
>>
>> At 02:14 PM 5/10/2010, Mike South wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"
>>> <<mailto:camping...@gmail.com>camping...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > Stupid, stupid wayback machine.
>>>
>>> It was probably the stupid robots.txt.
>>
>> Yes, please don't think ill of the Internet Archive.
>>
>> The folks behind the Internet Archive are selfless, generous people.  The
>> services they provide are incredibly valuable to global culture.
>
> They are using their power for Evil, and not Good. How else to explain the
> fact that instead of preserving my breathless prose, they instead saved an
> article about curtains? If that's isn't proof of malicious intent then I
> don't know what is.
>
> <walks off, all in a huff>

please provide examples of the articles you posted so we can verify
that they were more important than westy curtains. Consider also the
fact that, while westy curtains might be viewed by the owner as a boon
for the privacy of the owner, they also prevent the _rest of the
world_ from seeing the owner in their skivvies. Judging by the
curmudgeonly tone on the vanagon list, and the normal mental picture
one has of such curmudgeons, the service of protecting the world from
views of said vanagon inhabitants in various states of undress might
indeed be the noblest of all articles the wiki could have contained.

mike

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

This is a powerful argument. You have strong reasoning-fu.

--
Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott
84 Westfalia: Mellow Yellow ("The Electrical Banana")
74 Westrailia: (Ladybug Trailer company, San Juan Capistrano, Calif.)

Bend, OR, KG6RCR

[B]

The newest page (the one I started last weekend) is missing images. If you have an archive of the previous page including pictures, I'd suggest going with that.


B

[Steve Williams]

At 07:57 PM 5/11/2010, B wrote:
>The newest page (the one I started last weekend) is missing images.

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean you haven't added images
yet? Or did you add images and now they're missing?

Don't forget that the images from the wiki were saved and imported
into the new wiki:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:NewFiles

[B]

I had not yet added the images. When I clicked on the 'help' link there was no help there yet. Keep in mind this was last weekend ... presumably the new wiki site has been maturing since then. And ... nope. When I click the 'help' link, the page says, "There is currently no text in this page ..."

I see no evidence that the curtains page was imported from the saved wiki, either text or images. But I do have the images available at my own web site.

Aha! And now that I have the FCKEditor as the default, I have a toolbar button for inserting images into the wiki page. Rats! No, I don't. When I click that button it asks for an image file name with the prompt: "Automatic search results (start typing in the above field)". I need a way to browse to my image file, for uploading. And the dialog from the help toolbar button for the FCKEditor is seriously lame.

OK. Because I'm a geek -- but *only* because I'm a geek -- I see the link in the left menu for "upload file" so I will explore .... OK, looks like I upload the image using this link, and then use the editor to insert it into my page. Guys ... this is not going to work out as-is for any non-geek!!!!!! You're going to need to provide some help for anyone who wants to add content including images!

(BTW, I haven't yet inserted my images into the new curtains page, because my work this week turned into a bi^^witch and I'm exhausted tonight!)


B

[Marius Strom]

Hi all - I've went ahead and added the images. I think the confusion here
comes from the fact that the images were already uploaded to the wiki (by
Steve, from the archives), and so you just needed to know what the filenames
were.

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

B wrote:

> OK. Because I'm a geek -- but *only* because I'm a geek -- I see the
> link in the left menu for "upload file" so I will explore .... OK,
> looks like I upload the image using this link, and then use the
> editor to insert it into my page. Guys ... this is not going to work
> out as-is for any non-geek!!!!!! You're going to need to provide
> some help for anyone who wants to add content including images!

B's right. This is one example of the learning curve being too steep for
non-geeks that I was talking about. I know that we can't change how
FCKeditor works...I believe that the standard Mediawiki editor works the
same way. I don't know why they wrote this thing so that you have to
first upload before linking, but I had to explain that to more than one
contributor to Ye Olde Wikie. The functions could have been combined
(browse, upload, hey presto! image link is created) which is probably
more intuitive. But hey, this is what we got so we either have to write
up a better editor help entry for that, or something.

The workaround is "send your article and images to this address and one
of our helpful wikielves will post it for you".

--
Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott
84 Westfalia: Mellow Yellow ("The Electrical Banana")
74 Westrailia: (Ladybug Trailer company, San Juan Capistrano, Calif.)
Bend, OR

KG6RCR

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

Marius Strom wrote:
> Hi all - I've went ahead and added the images. I think the confusion
> here comes from the fact that the images were already uploaded to the
> wiki (by Steve, from the archives), and so you just needed to know what
> the filenames were.

Thanks for doing that, Marius.

Do the wiki have a handy "browse all uploaded images" feature? Maybe
someone has written an ez-2-install extension for that. I know that I
sometimes lost track of the images I previously uploaded and had to so a
stupid autofill guessing game when it came time to link to one.

[Steve Williams]

At 06:10 AM 5/14/2010, Mike \"Rocket J Squirrel\" wrote:
>Do the wiki have a handy "browse all uploaded images" feature?

Not from inside the editor, but there's a page for that:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:NewFiles

I agree about the Help links: Mediawiki installs without its on-line
help. That'd be fine, if the links pointed to a canonical copy of
on-line help, say, at mediawiki.org. But installing with the Help
links broken is just silly. There's a project going on to provide
packaged help for import to wikis like ours, but the status isn't clear:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:PD_help/export

Here's the lame workaround I applied on another Mediawiki site:

http://www.bondline.org/wiki/Help:Contents

I agree with the FCKEditor. I'm open to experimenting with other
Mediawiki extensions or other wikis altogether.

For another volunteer group, I installed Foswiki:

http://et.baychi.org/

I haven't used Foswiki very much. I like the features, but it'll
take some time to learn it. Foswiki addresses a couple of the issues
in this thread:

- Foswiki installs with complete on-line help.
- Foswiki installs with a working rich text editor.
- Foswiki's editor includes image upload (as "attachments" to the
page, which can then be placed and styled using the editor).

I leave it up to all of you to decide whether Mediawiki is adequate
or whether we should try something else. But I've been at this a
long time, and my experience tells me that whatever system you use
will have irksome limitations.

[Steve Williams]

Marius, apparently we admins can edit the Sidebar to change the Help
link into an interwiki link to Mediawiki's User Help.

I tried to do that, following this documentation:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar

But as far as I can tell, that doc is just unintelligible. Can you
figure it out?

[Peter DiFalco]

The short explanation is that images are really a separate Wikipedia "page", not just an attachment to the current page and so a rich text editor cannot simultaneously edit one page and create/modify another in the background. No extension can really get around this. 

I find it counterintuitive as well, and other Wiki systems make this much easier, but they have their own drawbacks and no Free Open-Source wiki system has the wealth of support, community and the probability of existing far into the future as MediaWiki does. 

So, a suggestion: I wonder if we can somehow modify the "edit" template so that when a person is editing a page there could be a prominent link directly to "How to Add Images To Your Article", knowing that this is probably the biggest hurdle to completing a first article our contributors will find...

-Peter

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

Peter DiFalco wrote:

> So, a suggestion: I wonder if we can somehow modify the "edit" template
> so that when a person is editing a page there could be a prominent link
> directly to "How to Add Images To Your Article", knowing that this is
> probably the biggest hurdle to completing a first article our
> contributors will find...

That may be just fine. The article should also list supported image
filetypes and max sizes, and I recall that I had a bit of an issue
getting pdfs to display. That might be a false memory, it might be real
easy to link to them, dunno.

Is the "edit" template editable to allow friendly bits like that?

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

Steve Williams wrote:
> At 06:10 AM 5/14/2010, Mike \"Rocket J Squirrel\" wrote:
>> Do the wiki have a handy "browse all uploaded images" feature?
>
> Not from inside the editor, but there's a page for that:
>
> http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:NewFiles

That works -- maybe put a link to that page from the "how to add images
to your article" page proposed by Peter?

[Steve Williams]

At 12:16 PM 5/14/2010, you wrote:
>Steve Williams wrote:
>>At 06:10 AM 5/14/2010, Mike \"Rocket J Squirrel\" wrote:
>>>Do the wiki have a handy "browse all uploaded images" feature?
>>Not from inside the editor, but there's a page for that:
>>http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:NewFiles
>
>That works -- maybe put a link to that page from the "how to add
>images to your article" page proposed by Peter?

Sounds like a plan. I don't know how to modify the editing
template. Will someone research that?

[Mike "Rocket J Squirrel"]

Steve Williams wrote:

> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar
>
> But as far as I can tell, that doc is just unintelligible. Can you
> figure it out?

Yikes. Codeland. There be monsters here.

[Peter DiFalco]

Here's how to do add text to the editing interface above the FCKeditor toolbar. Admin must alter the EditPage.php file. Find the line that says: 

$this->editFormPageTop =

Change to:

$this->editFormPageTop .= "<span>To insert images into your article, upload them first!</span>";

or, whatever text we want there, telling users how to upload files. I'm pretty sure this won't break anything. =)

-Peter

[Marius Strom]

done!

[Steve Williams]

Marius, very cool, thanks!

Can you tell me how you get the interwiki link to work? I tried it
on another of my Mediawiki sites, and it still didn't work.

[Marius Strom]

The Interwiki Link to mediawiki has to be mediawikiwiki:help:contents. The
docs said that you could just use mw: , but that wasn't configured on our
setup for some reason. I added mw: as a valid prefix, but mediawikiwiki: as
a prefix works.

[B]

On May 14, 2010, at 8:27 AM, Steve Williams wrote:

> [ edited ]

> For another volunteer group, I installed Foswiki:
>
> http://et.baychi.org/
>
> I haven't used Foswiki very much. I like the features, but it'll take some time to learn it. Foswiki addresses a couple of the issues in this thread:
>
> - Foswiki installs with complete on-line help.
> - Foswiki installs with a working rich text editor.
> - Foswiki's editor includes image upload (as "attachments" to the page, which can then be placed and styled using the editor).
>
> I leave it up to all of you to decide whether Mediawiki is adequate or whether we should try something else. But I've been at this a long time, and my experience tells me that whatever system you use will have irksome limitations.

I agree that whatever we upload is going to have some problems. Thing is, geeks create *all* of these tools. And they don't necessarily understand the train-of-thought (trainwreck, sometimes *g*) of a non-geek.

With the help page providing the link to the Mediawiki help, I would have been able to find out how to insert my image. I think it's reasonably clear. And for those who are still daunted, there's still the option of getting help from your FLWEP (Friendly Local Wiki Editor People).


B