User:Bjoern/oer.educ

A bit of reflection on what we'd like to get done in mediawiki. The things we would like to do come in several different flavours:

Higher priority, assuming that they are doable now

• The most important thing is to assess our wiki for upgradability. We have had some custom design, and some modification to the skin, and possibly to the code, and we would like to assess whether we can upgrade, and make these solutions more upgrade friendly

~1 day to setup the wiki in a way I can upgrade it more or less automatically

~0.5 day per each update (~ every two monthes)

~1 day should be necessary to migrate the current old version to a cutting edge version (but visual customisations could take longer, depending if we are lucky)

• Once we have upgrades, we would like to use of the mobile version http://m.something.

~1 day (maybe a browser autodection would be better, this is in addition easier to configure). What is important to notice, is that you will be probably able to re-arrange a few articles.

• We also need some performance testing. I don't think we've got a bad server, but have problems with speed, e.g. when doing edits. It's probably not a wiki issue as such, but we could do with some testing, to make our wiki snappier.

~1 day

• We need to have a more user friendly way of searching. We did some user testing, and the wiki search came up as something that users found a bit confusing. I know there's a lucene extension as well. We just don't have the time to put this in and experiment.

~2 days

• If Javascript solution is possible: Related to this, we would like to be able to (optionally) prefix the "session number" (which is arbitrary) to the wiki generated section numbers, so that section numbers don't appear as 1, 2, 3, but as 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3

~1 day

• If javascript solution is possible: On our wiki, different "projects" have different page headers, i.e. different boxes that show the project name. The have to come above the page title. Compare e.g. http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT, http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OER4Schools. This is really important for branding: Different projects needs to ahve their own identity. We have a mechanism for this (and we paid somebody to do this), bu it uses the 'site notice' at the moment, so we can't have site notices. (We don't need this to come through in the API, as we can adjust the html generate there.)

~ 1 day

• Zim bundling; server app and mobile app with kiwix, including incremental updates (assuming that this is doable now, we want to do this, but we can wait if significant updates coming out soon will make it easier). Also try http://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/zimwriterfs/

~ 3 days, assuming we have a more or less workable toolchain and this is not too complicated to get external videos. Really not so easy to guess at this stage of the dev. Would wait.

• Customise buttons in editor, e.g. to include strike through, some boxes, and include, noinclude - if this is still needed given the visual editor development

~1-2 day for a few easy features, but this really depends of what you want to do with this buttons.

We would like to try this when they come out of beta

Things that are in beta or coming soon, where we would like to be moving with releases as quickly as possible, such as

• the visual editor

~ 0.5 day

• better pdf output (with parsoid I guess), that allows us to use e.g. to display some sort of boxes (in HTML). We just need to be able to mark some text as 'special' in some way (e.g. some background info, or an "educator note"). With the pediapress book extension, that just wasn't possible.

~ 1 day, but still not available for now.

• We would also like to explore conversion of html5 to wiki text, to have a better way of importing documents into the wiki (where we generate html e.g. from word docs; the OO wikitext export has too many issues)

This is a lot of work.

Lower priority

• the collaborative editor when it comes out - that's not so urgent for us, but when it happens

There's an etherpad / google docs style editor for wikipedia in the making, allowing concurrent edits. But it's further off than the visual editor!

Notes

See http://www.sciencemedianetwork.org/wiki/Mediawiki/orbit/ORBIT3 for original page.