The WikiEducator environment

WikiEducator is where the Commonwealth of Learning has an excellent project for free e-learning content; I rate it as best of breed. As the Commonwealth of Nations consists of many countries in all parts of the world, WikiEducator has to take into account the many different cultures in order to provide quality education.

WikiEducator has invested in the development of its Open Source educational environment and this makes it a challenge to build an environment in the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment.

Many of the MediaWiki extensions are not in a code repository system. They are included as a text in a Wiki, sometimes they are just available to be downloaded. This has several drawbacks;

• the installer cannot load the code
• the code is not internationalised and localised at translatewiki.net
• it is not clear if there have been modifications to the code in the past

Even though it is not that hard to create a new extension in the WMF SVN, it is best when this is done either by the developers or by the people behind WikiEducator. When asked typically there is a positive response.

A special case is the LiquidThreads extension. This extension is broken in its latest revision. The testing environment makes it really easy to establish this or to find what effect other extensions have. The COL and Unicef are collaborating, it is fairly trivial to install and test the Uniwiki extensions in a combined environment as well.

The current incarnation of the WikiEducator testing environment can be found here.
Thanks,
     GerardM

WMF_testsystem update

The WMF_testsystem is one of the MediaWiki instances in the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment. This system is intended to mimick the English Wikipedia.

The way this configuration is build is distinctly different from the English Wikipedia. This system is scratch installed, it does not share the files needed for CentralAuth and MergeAccount, the Cite and the SpecialCite are in separate folders and last but not least, there are a few extensions that I have not figured out how to install yet.

What I really liked was that it took me only five minutes to rebuild my environment once Wikipedia was updated. Three minutes to change my installation script and two minutes to run it.
Thanks,
GerardM

Installing the UNIWIKI extensions

When you want to test software, you need to be able to set up an environment quickly and repeatedly. The Uniwiki extensions are tested by customers of Wikiation, a programmer is working on the code so it makes sense to be able to create this environment quickly.

Programming in bash is something that I did a really long time ago, so it was hard work for me to get the install scripts right. Once I had the first one working, the other nine were easy.

I am really fond of the Configure extension so I always install that one. The only thing that I have done is install the software and I leave it to you to test it.
Thanks,
GerardM