Jmol

Jmol is an extension I blogged about in the past. What Jmol does is show what chemicals, proteins look like. It does not only do a good job visualising, it really lightens up pictures that are otherwise rather dull.

Installing Jmol proved to be interesting, it has a prerequisite called StubManager. This is a tool that is essential for a whole range of extensions and it is required to be installed before all the tools that make use of it.

Jmol itself was interesting as well; it installed itself in a directory called MediaWiki and ia directory with java stuff. For the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment, we are looking for a standard way of installing the stuff because that also allows for clean un-installs. Everything is now in the Jmol directory, we now only have to make it work.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Revisions and Tags

When you are installing MediaWiki or MediaWiki extensions, it is often crucial to be able to install a particular revision or for a particular "tag". I am quite pleased to announce that the Wikiation installer is now able to install both for specific revisions or tags.

This functionality is currently very much bleeding edge. I do not know yet how to apply the tags to the scripts that I already wrote. So I will do some more documentation and some other work...
Thanks,
        GerardM

How to install RSS_Reader ?

RSS_Reader is an extension. It must be because it says so on the MetavidWiki and on the MediaWiki wiki. The problem that I face is that it has not been packaged as an extension.

That is a shame for several reasons.

• I cannot install it
• messages do not get internationalised and localised at translatewiki.net
• it prevents me from building a complete MetavidWiki test wiki with the installer
  

The information on the MetavidWiki says that it is "version 0.2.3". Now what if I need to run the software on a previous release. I may need "version 0.2.2" and I cannot get it because it is not in SVN.

I confess that I am not a developer. But I am quite sure that when you follow the instructions, you have something that might actually work. A developer, a real one, someone who Brion trust to submit to SVN, could then make it an extension so that I could do my "monkey see, monkey do" routine.
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

Installing SemanticForms

I created an installer script for SemanticForms, everything should work but it did not. I could not find what the problem was so I asked MinuteElectron to help me out. After some research he found that it had to do with the order in which the SemanticMediaWiki and the SemanticForms were loaded; they are loaded in alphabetical order so the SemanticForms came in first.

I have created a hack to get around this; I have renamed the SemanticForms.settings.php to xSemanticForms.settings.php. The documentation is clear; Semantic MediaWiki has to be installed and in this way MediaWiki is aware of this. Adding an x does the trick.

I wonder if this is one of those temporary solutions that will prove to be permanent.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Installing SemanticResultFormats

Programming is what I used to do a lot. The reason why I am programming again is because I am working on the documentation for the Wikiation Installer. I cannot document properly what I do not really understand and programming some installer scripts is one way of getting to grips with the issues.

I am testing in the "Fosdem" environment, this is where developers may test the existing functionality... I did install Semantic MediaWiki and I decided that I wanted to install SemanticResultFormats as well. I read the documentation and I found that due to a non standard include, I had to write an installer script. This is annoying but trivial

I tested it, the version special page reports it as being installed so I was good. However, it struck me that SemanticResultFormats has in SemanticMediaWiki a prerequisite. So I dabbled some more in the download.sh only to come to the conclusion that this is not the place where prerequisites are to be tested. The reason for this is that the include would be excercised anyway. When SemanticMediaWiki is not there, the whole installation should abort.

Writing installation scripts does help me understand the environment, it will help me write better documentation and in the mean time, I find where the software can use some more refinenment. I do confess that I am looking for the corner cases and so far I am really pleased how the installer is improving.
Thanks,
GerardM

Working from a template

So I was bold and decided to write the install and uninstall script for another extension. I chose ConfirmAccount because of its similarity to LiquidThreads.

There were many lessons for me to learn:

• how do I duplicate a directory - mkdir and cp -f
  
• where can I find the information about the MySQL files that are created
• how do I create a tar file with the directory in it - tar -cvvf confirmaccount.tar ConfirmAccount.install/
  
• how do I get this tar file from the system so that I can send it by mail
• what did I forget ?

It is not that hard but it really helps when things are done in a standard way.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Installing LiquidThreads

When you install LiquidThreads with the naive installer, it installs fine and it does not break MediaWiki. When you go to a talk page the system still breaks because the "thread" table is missing. When you read the documentation, it is quite obvious that LiquidThreads would fail in this way. There is a script that helps you to install the tables and as I expected that it would be relatvely easy to create a script for the complete install and uninstall of LiquidThreads I looked into this.

I asked MinuteElectron to help me out and provide me with an example, he added one line to the standard "download.sh". For the uninstall he added a few lines to the "uninstall.sh" and added a file with the names of the tables that were to be dropped.

I now have a template for creating install scripts for extensions. I will have to ask Kim or MinuteElectron to update SVN with my scripts because if I were Brion, I would not trust me with SVN either.
Thanks,
GerardM

258 out of 359 extensions can plausibly be installed with the naive installer

We are developing a test environment for MediaWiki. In order to test MediaWiki and its extensions we have to be able to install them. The "naive extension installer" makes a good faith approach to installing an extension. At this stage we call an installation a success when the install does not break MediaWiki.

NB We have installed the latest version of an extension on the latest version of MediaWiki at the time of testing.

When 72% of the extension can be plausibly installed, a lesser percentage will still need all kinds of things done before it is functional. All kind of other things may need to be addressed like configurations and what not. We already support the Configure extension for that ...

In all this info glut about installing extensions there is one other really important point: this is the first automated test of all extensions. This is the very start were we start to inform you with test results.
Thanks,
       GerardM

PS Is _your_ extension part of the 258 installable ones ???

Installing with Configure present - Edittools fun

I am really pleased announcing Configure support for the installation of extensions. Now when you install an extension, it will leave the enabling and the configuration to Configure. I asked for it, it is important and now I have to come to grips with it.

One of the things that it has is a button to enable an extension.. That is good. It does not necessarily help me understand how things work. The Edittools is one of my favourites and it needs CharInsert. So I enabled it and it does not give me my drop down box that should be there..

One of the friendly people at IRC told me about the existence of Edittools.js but is was not clear if this was what I had to install.

So it seems that there is functionality that needs all kinds of components, there is the message, there is the Edittools message, There is the Edittools.js and there is the CharInsert extension.

So how do I activate the Edittools.js and what to do with: "the dropdown is added by Edittools.js if document.getElementById('specialchars'). This is a bit inefficient though, and it is rather outdated code". I know for a fact that it is used on LOADS of MediaWiki servers..
Thanks,
GerardM

More extensions installed

We have made some great progress with the testing software.. Yesterday, the Babel extension failed to work properly. Some research showed that the current virtual machine runs an older version of PHP. Now that it works, we learned that the Babel extension needs some changes to the CSS.

It may sound odd, but working with the code, testing and learning what more needs to be done works well for us. We have made a lot of progress.

Over the weekend MinuteElectron and Denny have worked on an install script for Semantic MediaWiki. This is basic Semantic MediaWiki only. It installs clean and it uninstalls clean.

The next thing to get on-line is the Configure extension; we hope that this will give us even more possibilities in our testing environment.
Thanks,
      GerardM

First iteration of a naive extension installer

In the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment, we want to test extensions. These extensions have to be installed. To install an extension, you have to have a script to install a script ... Hmmm, that sound like work. Who is going to do that... Hmmm, we could write a "naive installer", that would solve 60/80% of the required scripts.

So Kim wrote a naive installer and it just does do a naive install. In the fosdem.wikiation.nl environment I abused the Brion wiki and installed the InputBox and the Babel extension. One of the two worked, both should have worked. Testing is nice.
Thanks,
GerardM

Getting started with testing

Wikiation has developed the ExtensionTesting software and environment. They have put a lot of effort in making sure that MediaWiki extensions can be tested in a structured way, in a way that helps all users of a MediaWiki installation.

When people create an environment like this, it is important that it provides great, inviting tools that make it almost compulsory to use. To help Wikiation achieve this goal, Stichting Open Progress has sought MinuteElectron to help test drive this environment and test an initial set of extensions.

There are not that many extensions that we have a special interest in. You can suggest extensions for us to test. Particularly requests that include information of what needs to be tested will be of our interest.
Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Stichting Open Progress