Mobile support in MediaWiki core
From MediaWiki.org
Mobile support in MediaWiki core
Building native mobile-device support in MediaWiki by porting critical components of Extension:MobileFrontend to core and building additional functionality as needed.
| Group: | Mobile |
| Start: | 2012-04 |
| End: | |
| Team: | Arthur Richards, Patrick Reilly, Max Semenik |
| Management: | Tomasz Finc |
| Status: | See updates |
Contents |
Status [edit]
[edit status] • [add new]
This project was mostly on hold.
Rationale [edit]
By default, MediaWiki does not offer mobile device-specific support, making MediaWiki sites very difficult to use on mobile devices. This has been mitigated in many ways by Extension:MobileFrontend, however there is much to be gained by building native mobile support into MediaWiki core. Such as:
- Increased performance
- A better framework for other extensions to make mobile-specific features
- Out-of-the-box mobile support for MediaWiki sites
- A present and future-ready device-agnostic core that can display data in a multitude of different ways, increasing MediaWiki's flexibility
- Greater developer and end-user support by increasing exposure to mobile-specific issues
Timeline [edit]
High Priority [edit]
- Move DOM Parsing mechanism into MediaWiki core [Patrick]
- Have current DOM parsing mechanism of MobileFrontend make greater use of memcached
- Investigate caching possibilities and performance impact (Patrick going to talk to Tim/Domas)
- Max has performance concerns moving parsing/extracts api into core; requires more investigation
- Make MediaWiki handled mobile-specific user options native parser cache [Patrick]
- View toggling and device detection [Arthur]
- Make MediaWiki core context/device aware [Arthur]
- straight override mode?
- is there a mobile version of this skin?
- Arthur's going to come up with suggestions about how to handle this and float to the tech lists
- Migrate SpecialMobileOptions into core [Max]
- All preparations are completed, waiting for something actually using it to be ready for a move so that it doesn't live in core alone and unused.
Delayed [edit]
- Migrate from using DOM parsing for mobile contexts to the native MediaWiki parser - The future (pending collaboration with VisualEditor team). [later]
- Move OpenSearchXml extending code back into OpenSearchXml extension
- Offer device-specific skins
Brainstorming notes [edit]
Brion's dream: One codebase to do everything except WAP
- WAP support is just a couple kb of code, we already have a WML skin. 46.44.51.115
Parser conversion [edit]
DOM parser currently just strips out things that sould not be present in a mobile view
- THIS SOULD BE REEVALUATED - are we stripping out the right elements? too many elements?
VisualEditor is going to result in core parser changes (Gabriel working on that?)
- No idea about timeline (October-ish range?)
- Can we work with them to make sure they're doing it right and/or get stuff migrated in as they go?
Parser changes are less cut-and-dry than DOM parser, so it's a little scarrier and will probably have a lot of edgey cases
Skinning [edit]
- Can we extend existing skin?
- Does it make more sense to have one mobile skin? Or let skins support mobile-stuff?
- Mobile 'fallback' skin?
Special pages [edit]
- Moving actions etc over to special pages will alleviate a lot of current pain points
Etc [edit]
- Make Mediawiki aware of context (mobile or not)
- for delivering proper URLs
- Would enable more flexible mobile-specific URL construction
- eg perhaps with a post-processing hook
- for resource loading
- view-related stuff like skin, blah
- perhaps start by moving dom-parser into core and rely on memcache, rely on key from parser cache
