Structured Discussions/Rollout


 * 1) Releases: A fairly high-level overview of changes to Flow.
 * 2) Rollout: List of wikis that have been Flow-enabled
 * 3) * see instructions for requesting Flow at a new wiki, at Flow/Request Flow on a page
 * 4) Process: steps to enable Flow on a wiki and a page.

Releases
How do we proceed: To see in detail what's changed:
 * 1) The latest Flow code appears on the beta cluster (test page).
 * 2) Every Tuesday between 18:00 and 20:00 UTC, the Flow code goes out with the new MediaWiki release to mediawiki.org (test page).
 * 3) On Thursday, that MediaWiki release is deployed on wikis
 * Collaboration team weekly deployment planning
 * browse in git or gerrit.
 * See subpages of MediaWiki 1.23 and MediaWiki 1.24
 * See development updates sent to the mailing list

(Older notes can be seen in this revision.)

Rollout
The following is a listing of wikis, with current Flow status. Also see wikis where Flow is available as a Beta feature or by default.

(Older notes can be seen in this revision.)

Requesting Flow at a new wiki

 * See How to request Flow?

Ways in which enabling Flow affects a wiki
Flow does not affect any non-special pages of a wiki other than the page(s) where Flow has been deployed.
 * See also the documentation


 * Feeds

You will see slight differences in Flow entries in:
 * RecentChanges
 * Special:Contributions
 * Watchlist
 * Special:Log

We're working to make those entries look more like page edits.


 * History

Each Flow topic has its own history. The Flow board is currently the history of topic-level changes. We're working to make it look and behave more like a page history.


 * Moderating content

Currently, deletion and suppression are done from the Flow board, by using the action menu next to a topic or post. In the future, we will move deletion and suppression actions to the history to make them work more like RevisionDeletion


 * Pagelinks, imagelinks, categorylinks, etc.

This functionality is not yet implemented, but work on it is currently in progress.

Steps in activating the Flow extension on a wiki

 * 1) Update this page
 * 2) Announce that Flow is going to be activated on the wiki's technical/admin notice boards.
 * 3) Ready Flow-enabled template, or custom messaging, for Board headers.
 * 4) Make sure no existing namespaces, nor their translations, conflict with Flow's   "Topic:" namespace, and its translations (see ).
 * 5) Check for any existing pages using the Topic: prefix, use Special:MoveTo to rename them.  Note, "namespaceDupes.php doesn't update references in other tables for pages it moved"
 * 6) Prep config change activating the extension and adding a test page (decide whether to distinguish a Flow feedback board from a Flow sandbox board, e.g.m:Talk:Flow/Developer test page)
 * 7) deploy config change, test test page, add Flow-enabled
 * 8) add the sandbox and local doc/feedback page to wikidata's interwiki lists

Steps in enabling Flow on a talk page
To enable Flow on an individual talk page, use Special:EnableFlow. It requires the  right.

Steps on converting an entire namespace to Flow

 * Check translation status at TranslateWiki.net. In addition to general status, check:
 * The archive prefix (flow-conversion-archive-page-name-format).
 * The name of the template (flow-importer-wt-converted-template).
 * The content of the template (flow-importer-wt-converted-template-content).
 * If the FlowCreateTemplates.php script was run before those updates, some updates to the wiki may be needed (e.g. the template content and name).
 * mwscript extensions/Flow/maintenance/convertNamespaceFromWikitext.php --wiki=somewiki 'Namespace_name'
 * mwscript populateContentModel.php --wiki=somewiki --ns=namespace_numeric_id --table=revision
 * mwscript populateContentModel.php --wiki=somewiki --ns=namespace_numeric_id --table=archive
 * mwscript populateContentModel.php --wiki=somewiki --ns=namespace_numeric_id --table=page
 * Immediately after the above, deploy a change that updates wmgFlowNamespaces in InitialiseSettings.php.