Submissions/Extension Management Platform

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Title of the submission
MediaWiki Extension Management
Type of submission
presentation
Author of the submission
Jeroen De Dauw
E-mail address or username
jeroendedauw at gmail dot com
Country of origin
Belgium
Affiliation, if any
MediaWiki developer, done MW and SMW work for WMF, WikiWorks, KIT and others
Personal homepage or blog
http://blog.bn2vs.com
Abstract
This presentation will introduce you to a Google Summer of Code project mentored by Brion Vibber that has as goal the creation of an extension management platform for MediaWiki.
Project description:
A panel where wiki administrators can install, update and remove extensions has huge benefits. First of all, people do not have to manually download an extension and put an includes in LocalSettings, neither do they need to worry about compatibility and dependencies. Hitting an update button also takes considerably less time then doing the whole download routine again, and will cause people to run more up to date extensions. Another important advantage is that people will get a list recommended and related extensions, and can easily browse them. This way people can find extensions that do something they wanted but did not know about, and in general will have extensions that better suit their needs. A third advantage is that extension developers do not need to do extreme efforts to let people know there is a new version (and probably still only reach part of the relevant public). The user experience should be as awesome as the Wordpress one, or even better.
The second goal of this project is to add setting management for individual extensions. Currently extension settings are managed via LocalSettings. The aim here is to completely remove the need of editing any file directly by storing the configuration the the MediaWiki database, and creating a GUI to modify these settings. This would involve creating API modules so extensions can add and update their own settings. Another goal is to create a management interface for the wiki's configuration itself. The configure extension does a nice job of this already, so can probably simply be build upon.
Track
Collaboration/Infrastructure
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted? Yes
Slides or further information (optional)


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