User:Dereckson/Reviews/Nimbus

The Nimbus extension is a port of a Wordpress extension to generate a tag cloud.

A first quick evaluation has been made 2013-01-15, following the it.wikivoyage's request.

On MediaWiki
The extension isn't currently maintained by the original author.

Supported versions by the extension are 1.14-1.16, we're are 1.21.

A stewardship request from 2011 (code ported to 1.17) is still pending a reply.

On Wordpress
This is an adaptation of a Wordpress plugin, which isn't maintained either.

The author has added the following disclaimer on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/: "IMPORTANT NOTICE This plug is no longer actively being developed. I do not recommend you install and use it. If you are currently using this plugin, please consider disabling it. Running unmaintained plugins in WordPress can cause security- and other issues. More info at roytanck.com. Should anyone be interested in taking over development, please contact me."

On live wikis
The extension lists some wikis using it, but I can't find a tag cloud on any of them, including when the extension is in Special:Version.

Repository
The extension isn't currently tracked in a repository.

The files are scattered between files to fetch from WP-Nimbus and a code to copy/paste from the extension page.

Design review

 * The extension uses Flash and not CSS to render content, allegedly for fonts support
 * The heuristic isn't documented
 * The operations to support I18n seem tedious.

Code review
After the maintenance assessment and the design issues, it doesn't seem necessary to do a proper and comprehensive code review at this stage.

Recommendations

 * 1) Evaluate the heuristic efficiency.
 * 2) Contact User:Aiden, as he's interested to take over extension maintainership
 * 3) Upgrade the extension to 1.19+ (1.19 being our current LTS release)
 * 4) Render the tag output in CSS, not in Flash