Environments

When you test an installer, you need to test the installation of extensions. I made the choice to build copies of MediaWiki environments. My assumption is that the functionality of great environments is what would be of interested to many people.

Referata provides a best practice environment for Semantic MediaWiki. Yaron, the man who runs Refarata is also behind many of the Semantic MediaWiki extensions. Obviously the secret sauce of Referata is Yaron's ability to fix whatever comes his way.

I informed Yaron about the test environment, we found some issues and he fixed them for us.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Installing a MediaWiki system

How long does it take to install a new MediaWiki system with Semantic MediaWiki?  It takes me a minute and yes, I cheated because I automated the process. This kind of automation is extremely important to us because it is the basis for running automated tests.

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