Please check the Koha MediaWiki Canasta with Koha Portainer test instance for bugs, at https://wiki.test.koha-community.org .
Please do not make wiki contributions that you want to save in the MediaWiki Canasta with Koha Portainer test instance as they will not be saved when we go live with a freshly migrated up to date copy of the wiki. Continue to make lasting contributions to the production wiki at https://wiki.koha-community.org . In the absence of any show stopping bugs, we may go live with a freshly migrated up to date copy of the Koha database on Wednesday 26 October. Also in the absence of show stopping bugs, the Koha production wiki may be marked with a warning message of the impending change and then set to read only overnight Tuesday or Wednesday morning as a dump is prepared. If the production wiki is ultimately not migrated Wednesday in the absence of any blocking bug please do not be too disappointed, schedules are tight with preparing a new Koha release and it may happen the following week, in which case the read only status will be temporarily lifted and a warning of impending change will be applied. Sorry for the short testing notice, but I suspect someone will find any blocking bug quickly after all the previous testing which has been done. Last week when this notice should have gone out I temporarily broke all images and editing on a different test instance of the wiki while trying to fix a Docker container specific permission bug on a different test instance of the wiki for a bug which does not occur when the test instance is running in a standard environment without the Docker container. Restarting the Canasta Docker container quickly fixed the broken test wiki instance allowing the original small bug to be fixed but that is an example of why even fixing small bugs should be done on a test instance first. Please read below for an understanding of what to expect before reporting issues about which we are already aware, such as the test database is not a current copy of the wiki and the mail system for resetting login passwords on the test copy of the wiki is not working. You may report bugs to the bug "wiki needs updating to a later version", https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=23073 . WIKI DATABASE MIGRATION, UPGRADE, AND CONTAINER MANAGEMENT. For the test instance, the Koha MediaWiki database has been migrated from Postgres to MySQL and upgraded to MediaWiki 1.35.07, the current long term stable version using a repeatable process managed with a set of scripts which I developed in bash, Perl, and Python as appropriate for the task and previous code in the case of Python. Choosing Postgres as the database for a test instance for MediaWiki had left us with a mistake complicating compatibility and future upgrades when it suddenly became the only Koha wiki when the previous Koha wiki went down in the midst of a community schism with LibLime. The migration process has been developed and progressively tested over the course over time from 2019 for ensuring that the database is migrated correctly etc. building upon originally incomplete and sometimes mistaken Python script of Philipp Spitzer but which was a fantastic proven starting point without which the task may have been some degree too much. Mason James ran a web crawl and diff test to verify that the production and another test migration of the wiki have the same content except for evident changes where the production wiki was updated with new content. The database was imported to MediaWiki Canasta which Tomás Cohen Arazi identified and customised to connect to the Koha Portainer Docker container management to provide MediaWiki in a Docker container with a large set of important extensions to help make managing the MediaWiki software easier. See https://github.com/CanastaWiki for more about MediaWiki Canasta. See further below for a little about other modifications which I made to support dynamic archiving, etc. KNOWN ISSUES. The test instance is using what may be about a two month old copy of the database for testing purposes, therefore, lack of currency for the test wiki content is not a bug. The mail system for resetting wiki login passwords etc. may not be working for the test wiki server, however, we expect the mail system to be fixed on or about the time of going live. There have been bugs specific to MediaWiki Canasta rearranging some standard files for the Docker container which have been addressed. However, there are at least some Canasta Docker specific bugs relating to the Docker container environment. Please report any instances of "Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination" which I found in the Koha History page https://wiki.test.koha-community.org/wiki/History . Instances of the bug can be fixed with command line shell access by removing the images/thumbs/$buggy_image_name subdirectory for the image and which allows MediaWiki to recreate the subdirectory without a problem and the bug goes away. We should probably remove all the subdirectories in the images/thumbs directory proactively. Yet, why is there a special problem for the Docker container which does not exist in other test instances when not using a Docker container and the container environment is running as the root user as standard for Docker containers and the root user should have all the permission necessary to access or create a thumbnail directory? Changing the ownership of the images directory and subdirectories back and forth to test the effect temporarily broke the test instance of the wiki until the container was restarted. All software has bugs and non-blocking bugs will have to be addressed after going live. MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS FROM UPGRADING. The VisualEditor extension used by Wikipedia is a WYSIWIG and guided forms aid for visually editing the underlying wikitext for a page and using guided forms for adding some features to a page. Users can switch back and forth between source editing in all wikitext syntax and VisualEditor, however, it may be best to save the current edit before switching back and forth to avoid problems of imperfect correspondence between wikitext syntax and the VisualEditor model of wikitext. The AdvancedSearch extension used by Wikipedia is helpful for a user friendly interface to construct search queries and modify them by removing terms which appear in a bubble with an [x] to remove the term. AdvancedSearch depends on ElasticSearch which performs remarkably well in testing and allows the wiki to be reindexed in a couple of minutes if necessary. See below for modifications to AdvancedSearch extension. SemanticMediaWiki was reinstalled before copying the upgraded database. Modifying the AdvancedSearch extension in conjunction with special navigation links is more helpful and custom queries using carefully managed standard wiki categories may be more helpful than SemanticMediaWiki. Furthermore, anyone experimenting with SemanticMediaWiki should be aware that verbose syntax is required to avoid breaking most wikis with SemanticMediaWiki after forthcoming MediaWiki updates in which a hook commonly relied upon for SemanticMediaWiki which has been deprecated will be removed. Wikipedia does not use SemanticMediaWiki and thus some MediaWiki developers may not have given sufficient consideration to managing the issue. The workaround may involve a potential performance deficit when using SemanticMediaWiki search queries. The MassEditRegex extension has power one might hope for in the name for using regular expressions to modify a list of pages. However, given its power it remains commented out in LocalSettings.php. Use is intended to be for some special group of users such as wiki administrors, however even they should first test their process on a test version of the wiki. Furthermore, use should be with a bot account set up by the user so that they may be identified as the work of a bot process and those mass changes may avoid adversely affecting page modification priorities in search result sets. The creation of user bot accounts should be documented. In testing, MassEditRegex works fantastically well for adding categories to the bottom of pages and templates to the top of pages which can be done without risk of an inadequately debugged regular expression breaking page content. MODIFIED FEATURES. I modified the following to support dynamic archiving in which obsolete content does not appear by default for search results unless the user goes directly to the advanced search page without following provided navigation links or changes the default VectorMod skin affecting the basic search box. ADVANCEDSEARCH EXTENSION WITH MODIFICATIONS. The AdvancedSearch extension has been modified to include two additional form elements: one for excluding particular categories and another for excluding particular templates. These additional elements appear in the user friendly AdvancedSearch term bubbles which can be individually removed from a query by clicking on the [x] for the particular bubble. Editing the non-English localisation files is still pending. For languages for which a non-English localisation file has not been edited, the custom fields for category and template exclusion display a description in English. DeepCategory searches for subcategories of a category is disabled because it requires a sparkle database and is only updated on a weekly basis for Wikipedia. Searching subcategories of a category should be less of an issue with faceted use of categories which we should be carefully moving towards. Excluding particular categories supports dynamic archiving by supporting search queries excluding obsolete pages with -incategory:"Obsolete", which is automatically invoked from the navigation link "Advanced Search current" or from simple search box when using the modified Vector skin, VectorMod. Obsolete pages are also noted with a prominent notice using the Obsolete template. Such pages should be updated if they can be, but are otherwise available to consult most importantly for valuable information they often contain which is not yet present in current pages. Archived obsolete pages can be found exclusively by following the navigation link "Advanced search obsolete archive" which includes incategory:"Obsolete" automatically. The result set for search queries with incategory:"Obsolete" can be used to identify the type of pages which should have the Obsolete category and Obsolete template but do not yet, such as installation information for some particular old Debian versions. Various combinations of including and excluding categories and templates can be easily used in the modified AdvancedSearch to find pages which only have one of either the Obsolete category or Obsolete template which should be used together or both removed if the page has been updated to be current. All wiki pages should have some category even if it may be [[Category:Empty]] for people uncertain of what may be appropriate in the moment. Pages missing categories may not be disappearing from query results by category when using ElasticSearch indexing as they had been when using database based search indexing. We can also query for pages missing categories using https://wiki.koha-community.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UncategorizedPages and correct the issue which has been neglected due to loss of time where migrating and upgrading the wiki has been the priority with much less time available otherwise especially since the pandemic. We should take some care when thinking about faceted category use as no wiki software uses fielded categories. Thus there may be no concise way to query for pages which address a topic in a general way or supplement other documentation on a topic containing a lone category such as [[Category:Circulation]], if we then have many other pages with [[Category:RFCs]] and [[Category:Circulation]] but no longer [[Category:Circulation RFCs]] as a possible change for faceting. In such an example, the search results of a query for incategory:"Circulation" might have a result set in which pages for RFCs relating to circulation issues containing both [[Category:RFCs]] and [[Category:Circulation]] might crowd out more generally helpful pages with [[Category:Circulation]] alone. The problem may indicate a need for a navigation link to exclude RFCs from a search query; designating old RFCs as obsolete; or both. Alternatively or additionally, we may be able to adjust the weighting of the ElasticSearch indexing options such that pages containing [[Category:RFCs]] have a lower weight and appear further down the result set or pages with a single category such as [[Category:Circulation]] alone or some particular additional categories such as [[Category:Documentation]] have higher weight and appear further up the result set. VECTORMOD SKIN. Users are free to choose their own preferred MediaWiki skin and we can add others. VectorMod is merely set as the default to help people avoid obsolete pages when submitting search queries from the simple search box which appears on every page. VectorMod is a custom version of the Vector skin which includes a modified version of Vector/includes/templates/SearchBox.mustache supporting dynamic archiving of obsolete content by excluding pages which have been designated obsolete by automatically adding -inCategory:"Obsolete" to basic search querries. The syntax incategory requires using ElasticSearch. Previously, I replaced the SearchBox.mustache file in the Vector skin directly, which certainly worked without the extra effort of creating a custom skin. Automatically inserting -inCategory:"Obsolete" in the basic search box is now somewhat elegant in conjunction with the modified AvancedSearch extension as it uses explanatory language labels with a bubble which has a removal [x] and allows autocompletion of query terms. Significant renaming of references to Vector as VectorMod and vector as vectormod has been scripted will allows both Vector and VectorMod to be loaded and available to users. Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com +1 212-674-3783 _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Unsubscribe: https://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
