Talk:Shifti UI Revamp
Enhancements, part 1:
- Most of these features are available in other Wiki's but not MediaWiki. Might be possible to get these working with extensions.
- Page ownership might be possible to track via an extra database table cross-linking page-name and page-creator, though we could co-opt a parser-extension to flag the owner based on page-contents.
- Classification and categorization is possible through the existing semantic tags and category tags but this system is not fine-grained enough to keep most people happy.
- Other meta-data is possible via new database tables and parser-tags
- We've tried various feed-back extensions in the past and seen them used to bypass the spam-protections we have in place. The suggestion is a good one, though...
- Categorization for all pages will be tough, since there are some authors that raised concerns over forced-categorization that could reveal a twist in the story or the punchline of a humorous story... This led to the "leave the categorization up to the authors" decision early on.
- Metadata formatting is a hard one, since the fully-parsed metadata is not available to the user at page creation time and metadata links are generated by the parser separately.
Enhancements, part 2:
- Shiftimin needs fixing bad - there are bits that I passed-up on implementing because the sites default is Monobook.
- It needs a lot of re-organization work for various bits
- It relies on some JS to make certain features function in versions of IE prior to IE8 (which has full CSS 2.1 support - which was needed)
- Current menu format is relied upon by other skins. If we manage to get a customized skin that works well on all major browser versions used by Shifti's visitors then it could be changed.
- Shiftimin contains hacks where it reads the current format and builds its own structure from it
Enhancements, part 3:
- Semantic system can be extended to fill this role
- Custom category pages should be possible
Enhancements, part 4:
- There are a number of alternative editors available for MediaWiki.
- The revisions system would be good...
- Current editor selectively uses Javascript. WYSIWYG replacements would rely heavily on JavaScript. Any 'revisions' system would rely on AJAX for communicating revisions back to the server for storage.
Enhancements, part 5:
- Massive amounts of documentation are required anyway. We currently point people to primary MediaWiki documentation for basic markup help and to places like the Semantic MediaWiki home for help with the Semantic system.
Basically the idea is good, but will require many, many changes to the core code and some ideas go against principles in others. I'll conditionally condone this one.
- -- ShadowWolf 20:30, 17 August 2009 (UTC)