User talk:Isarra

 Dear, Welcome to MediaWiki.org !

Yes, welcome! This site is dedicated to documenting the MediaWiki software, the software behind many wikis, including that of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:
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If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site useful documentation of the MediaWiki software. Thanks, and regards, Jack Phoenix (Contact) 22:45, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Whoo! -— Isarra ༆ 22:51, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

unknown symbol
Hello, I like your picture. What codepage (language) should I install to see this ༆ symbol on my computer (if u no)? Нирваньчик (talk) 14:10, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh, that's tibetan, bo. Took some searching before I found some fonts for that one myself, now that you mention it. -— Isarra ༆ 15:30, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

"No policy survives contact with users"
Yeah, and not all users survive contact with policy. By the way, when are we supposed to use, or refrain from using, PHP closing tags? I assume that refers to the ?>, right? I tried to search for it: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=closing+tags&title=Special%3ASearch That didn't work out too well. Leucosticte (talk) 08:14, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
 * According to the coding conventions, 'When working in a pure PHP environment, remove any trailing ?> tags.' So I guess that means we should refrain, something about... something. I take it you saw the (Added PHP closing tag) tag on the revisions themselves, though? The filter's regex was probably just catching on the... whatever that is in the choice template thing; I wouldn't worry about it. -— Isarra ༆ 15:29, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Outreach Program for Women endorsements (proposed project)
I'm a woman. -— Isarra ༆ 01:39, 2 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Isarra is indeed a woman. She also has some good ideas, and would benefit greatly from the chance to work with an experienced mentor. —Emufarmers(T 03:49, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Whee. Thanks. -— Isarra ༆ 03:18, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Note to self
MWA needs stuff:
 * Add note in about option to log in with the target wiki's credentials (clarity for users, and also to deal with privacy concerns, etc)
 * qqx is relatively new; won't be supported on older target wikis - wafflelanguage it is?
 * Class should be moved to class file
 * Option whether or not to import watchlist and crap, or just preferences
 * Figure out what the hell the thing actually does and document it
 * Add/find a bloody hook in core to avoid having to use patches on specialuserlogin, which is annoying
 * Formatting and crap for translation updates, assuming the twn folks aren't too stubborn to take up things after having previously rejected them...

Maybe if I put this here I'll actually see it later. I sort of use this wiki. It's sort of relevant. There's sort of a chance this could happen. -— Isarra ༆ 22:42, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Scary monsters
Test. --Orcaen solns (talk) 00:13, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Testing for Echo
You should be getting a notification now.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Grand plot to overthrow Bugzilla
Grand plot to overthrow Bugzilla is wonderful and you're wonderful. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 18:17, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Jack Phoenix is wonderful. Also I really need to install font support for my signature one of these days... -— Isarra ༆ 23:07, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
 * By the way, Extension:IssueTracker looks kinda promising. Whatever issue tracker we use should probably be a MediaWiki special page extension. Leucosticte (talk) 08:52, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

How to keep CategoryTree stayed opened after going back?
When I am going down in one category and subcategories (depth 5-6), after

loading the specified category and then hitting the "back" button on the

browser, the category tree is folded again. Is there any chance the tree stays

opened? Please reply ASAP... How to keep nodes expaneded even after

clicking back button in browser.Any code changes to be done in Categorytree

extension?


 * I have absolutely no idea. -— Isarra ༆ 00:57, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

The future of skins
Hi.

An rfc on the future of skins is open here:
 * Requests for comment/HTML templating library

Please consider participating. Thanks. :-)

--Gryllida 04:31, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Please provide feedback on suggested improvements to the Code of Conduct
Thanks to everyone who’s helped work on the Code of Conduct so far.

People have brought up issues they feel were missed when working on "Unacceptable behavior" and "Report a problem". Consultants have also suggested changes in these same sections.

These are important sections, so please take a look at the proposed changes. I apologize that this feedback arrived later than planned, but I think this will create a better document.

If you prefer to give your opinion privately, feedback via e-mail is welcome at conduct-discussion@undefinedwikimedia.org.

Thanks. Mattflaschen-WMF via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:18, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Feedback about Timeless
Hello Isarra ! Thanks again for your work on Timeless ! As you know the skin was deployed yesterday as a beta feature on French Wikipedia. The community was happy to discover this novelty. Following the announcement, lots of users have made different remarks, in French. Note that a few of them only concern our website, and its templates and css. Do you want me to translate everything in one part ? that I create a separate phabricator tasks for each of them, and let you close them individually if they look invalid to you ? --Framawiki (talk) 20:51, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Ping :) --Framawiki (talk) 18:18, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Agh, yes, hi, I'm sorry, I'm way too swamped and lost this in my sea of tabs. If you can just file all the tasks, that would be great - I'll go through them all when I have a chance, but that way anyone else can also poke at it pretty easily too. -— Isarra ༆ 19:35, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'll do it :) --Framawiki (talk) 15:16, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you. -— Isarra ༆ 21:11, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Bravo!
I've been running Timeless on my personal wikis for a while and have switched my enwiki skin to it! It's great! Looks good, and you've done a good job. I'm super happy about it.--Jorm (talk) 22:05, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh, cool! I'm really glad you like it, and yeah, this is a hell of a milestone, having it rolled out to all the projects here. It's not even anywhere near done, either - so much left to implement from the original Winter stuff, and especially all the feedback we've been getting now. -— Isarra ༆ 20:48, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Adding infoboxes to Timeless right-side whitespace?
Hi, I am working on some custom infoboxes and sidebars for a wiki and I'm looking to have them sit in Timeless' whitespace outside of the content area itself, above the categories. What div class should I have them in to be accomplish that? --Dragonshardz (talk) 22:21, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Oooo, voodoo. Cool. What exactly are you working with to do this? (onwiki css, js gadget, extension, etc?) I'm not entirely sure I understand your question/expectations without more context. -— Isarra ༆ 23:12, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * - And months later, I resurface. At the moment, onwiki CSS, but anything could work. Basically, what I want to be able to do is have infoboxes, sidebars, and even the TOC sit to the right of the center "column" where all the article text is. Basically, this: https://i.imgur.com/OWHRA6f.png


 * Being able to throw code into an template built with divs which causes the resulting box to sit in the same region where the page tools, in other languages, categories, etc. are and push them downwards. At the moment all I know for sure I have to work with is CSS, but I'm not inherently opposed to JavaScript gadgets or any other solution that would make this possible. --Dragonshardz (talk) 06:51, 18 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Okay, so if you're doing a gadget, you'll probably want to use js to, er, move the div out of the content container and into the sidebar (#mw-related-navigation) in the DOM, and add the relevant class(es) (.sidebar-chunk) so it's styled with those styles, (both of these should be very simple with jquery, so if you're not familiar, just look that up) and then add whatever custom css you want to finish the styles after that. -— Isarra ༆ 17:26, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Filed a task for this in general, as I've seen similar come up a few times. -— Isarra ༆ 22:41, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Timeless: Non-sticky Search?
On enwiki (and here),the search box is no longer staying put on Timeless. The colored bars are, however. A change?--Jorm (talk) 00:02, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * You mean when you scroll down, it's no longer fixed? Sounds broken, but I can't reproduce. When exactly did this start? -— Isarra ༆ 03:21, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Today. I haven't tried to do any investigation, though.--Jorm (talk) 04:39, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Hrm. This may be a Chrome thing, as it's happening on a wiki I manage (that I haven't updated) as well.--Jorm (talk) 05:38, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I can't seem to replicate this on any chrome on linux (I was a bit out of date, so I updated and tried the beta/dev channels, too).
 * I might note that the header does not appear to be fixed at all at mobile resolutions, but what you described about the colour bars still sticking sounds rather different from that, anyhow. -— Isarra ༆ 18:55, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * So I did a bit more investigation. Here is the behavior I see and what I've gathered so far from the inspector:
 * Upon scrolling up, there's a delay point (when .mw-content-container breaks the upper viewport bounds) and at that point .mw-header-container disappears but .mw-header-hack remains. The rest of the page (.mw-content-container) is visible through the box.
 * Hovering over where the logo is (#p-logo-text), the cursor goes "hot" and the link works (clicking brings you to the home page)
 * Hovering over the Username link (#personal) causes the header to reappear and the menu to form. The menu can be interacted with but hovering off that or the username causes it all to disappear again.
 * It appears that all elements in the header work. It gets the typing cursor when over the searchbox, for instance, and clicking in you can type (but you can't see what you're typing); hitting return executes the search.
 * The Echo buttons are operative as well, and clicking them opens their menus but it does not show the bar again.
 * Does not happen in Firefox.
 * Does not happen in Chrome Version 66.0.3359.139 (Official Build) (64-bit)
 * Does happen in Chrome Version 67.0.3396.30 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
 * I thought maybe it was a z-index issue but it isn't. It feels like an opacity issue, but I'm not seeing any css that would affect it.
 * My thoughts that it was a chrome beta thing still hold water, but it looks like this release was on the 27th. Mine apparently updated on the first:

bharris@zombieland /Applications $ ls -l | grep Goog drwxrwxr-x@ 3 bharris  admin   96 May  1 13:55 Google Chrome.app
 * I'm gonna keep poking at it and I'll let you know what I discover.--Jorm (talk) 19:23, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Man, that is just strange. I tried the same version but everything seemed normal, but this really does sound like it's chrome... have you tried the dev build to see if it's still happening there?
 * Honestly they're all so weirdly buggy I wouldn't be surprised if it's just picking up more problems as it goes, though. I had to quit using timeless entirely when I switched to chrome as my main browser because the clipboard completely quit working in it. That at least is on my todo list to fix since I think I know what particular rule chrome is flipping out at there, but ugh. -— Isarra ༆ 13:33, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Are you not maintaining it anymore?--Jorm (talk) 03:52, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
 * As much as I can in my spare time. That's why I've been requesting funding to work on all this properly, because there's not much of that to begin with, and I also have other projects that are just as interesting competing for my attention.
 * Since specifically with my bug the fix is pretty much to rewrite how the entire layout works to accommodate a single browser, 'ugh'. And yours? I can't even reproduce. While I do recommend filing a task in case someone else can figure it out, there's not a whole lot I can do. -— Isarra ༆ 13:25, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 2
Newsletter • August 2018

The second issue of the Timeless newsletter is out.

The news: Themes are coming to Timeless! Your infobox and navbox templates in particular are probably going to look absolutely horrible in the new built-in night mode.

For more information, background, plans and progress updates, please see the full issue on Meta, complete with a ridiculous list of phabricator task links, gratuitous mention of other skins, and me complaining about the current state of MediaWiki skinning in general.

-— Isarra ༆ 01:48, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * FECK. -— Isarra ༆ 17:28, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 3
Newsletter • December 2018

Welcome to the third issue of the Timeless newsletter, complete with a somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time.

Somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time:

I suffered a rather bad concussion in October, which knocked me pretty much completely out of commission through November, and I'm still recovering even now. One person = bus factor of one, even though it wasn't actually a bus but a very short flight of stairs.

Updates:


 * Random bugs have been fixed. More bugs have been found. For a full list of horrors, see the workboard.
 * Implementing themes (T131991: the dark/night mode and winter variants of the skin) has proven far more complicated than initially thought, lacking either the extension, or preferably, some core support for this functionality. Thus:
 * I have submitted a Request for Comment proposing to merge Extension:Theme into core - this will enable skins to specify style variants as distinct options for users to select in their preferences by letting the skin specify the styles separately for each, a much neater way of implementing this than some of the existing hacks.
 * Jack Phoenix has already submitted a patch to do this. We simply need the buy-in and consensus to merge it, and to resolve whatever issues may arise from this wider review.

Comments on the RfC (MediaWiki wiki RfC page, task) or bugs, or further reports, are always appreciated.

Until next time, hopefully with no further injuries,

-— Isarra ༆ 22:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 4
Newsletter • April 2019

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Timeless newsletter, with a cat! Or maybe not.

Un chat qui miaule???

It's true! The angry cat, a fundamental part of Timeless, has resulted in confusion and bug reports all across the projects and phabricator. And now it shall be immortalised forever in the new, shiny Timeless logo.

Updates:

After putting off the project for three months because I got hit in the head with a flight of stairs, and then putting off the project for another two months while working out what the status of the grant was, I have now put off the project even more in order to focus on my other project for a bit. So progress lately has been a bit whims-based as a result:
 * The project now has a logo. For some reason.
 * The angry cat in the background is now customisable! Behold: not a cat. What would you like to replace it with on your project?
 * I broke, unbroke, and then sort of sideways broke all the form styles. Help.

Radar:
 * The French Wiktionary voted to set Timeless as their default skin, with results possibly as you might expect: I ran away and hid, and the WMF said no. A bit of discussion later and we largely agreed that all else aside, this is a bit of a branding issue, but we love the enthusiasm! Also the bug reports that inevitably come out of such a discussion. I'm still working on properly going through those.
 * Theme support is still stuck in limbo, but now we have another skinning RfC. tl;dr, we wanna replace the entire skinning system, and Skizzerz'll write a prototype later.

I will be fully resuming work on Timeless next week, or maybe the week after, depending on what madness (or illness) comes out of the Hackathon in Prague. Please come talk to me there to discuss strategy!

-— Isarra ༆ 16:51, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 5
Newsletter • August 2019

Welcome to the fifth and final issue of the Timeless newsletter!

'''Progress was made. True story.'''

I am happy to announce that after about a year, this delightful project in which absolutely nothing has gone according to plan is coming to a close. Or at least, the grant-funded portion is. Which means we will now be resuming our regular schedule of random whims-based development, you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever unless you use MonoBook, and there's a report.

What's new from the past two months:

A lot less than we'd hoped, frankly. We:
 * Fixed various bugs, some of which even weren't for stuff I'd just broken two patches previously.
 * Resolved sundry compatibility issues for other extensions, templates onwiki, whatever, largely by removing dumb crap from the css.
 * Implemented some shiny new features you'll probably hate or just never use or actually see, like click-toggled dropdowns, icons everywhere, and options to select a default layout or set an image for the site header wordmark.
 * Brought the total number of open tasks on the Timeless workboard down to 70.

We also wound up with:
 * Patches resulting in RelatedArticles working in MonoBook, and FlaggedRevisions showing up in Minerva, unless someone actually managed to turn that off as well. (Blame T181242.) It's possible we went a little overboard with the whole 'let's close all the tasks!' sprint.
 * An unfortunate repeated discovery that themes (the Night/Winter variants I keep insisting will happen at some point) are still pretty far off on the horizon. Um.
 * Possibly a quite a few more bugs coming your way. This month, and especially the past week, have been a bit of a mess, development-wise. While hopefully none of the worse issues make it to production, please keep the reports coming for whatever you do find and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can. Y'all've been amazing about this, and it's really appreciated.

And I guess that's that. I'm really bad at reporting, and this is a report. For the purposes of the grant, this was a requirement, but do you want me to keep trying to send these out?

-— Isarra ༆ 18:08, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

WikiCon NA AMA: Ask the developers
Hi Isarra, I plan to attend your WikiCon NA session AMA: Ask the developers on Saturday, mostly with questions around the limits of Wikidata, as per this session later that day and would appreciate if you could take a look at this accompanying incomplete documentation in preparation. Thanks! I'll also notify User:Bawolff. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 05:57, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Yup, I got nothing. -— Isarra ༆ 15:44, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Voice-interface "skin" for illiterate users?
A (Kalliope-based?) voice interface to Mediawiki would help illiterate/semiliterate users. If you rented time in an internet café, or bought a cheap Android or KaiOS phone, and you couldn't read, you could use the browser to go to a special display of Wikipedia. There, you could navigate it by voice and have it read articles to you, highlighting the text and media as it read, and maybe even make read-it-back edits.

So my query, multiple-choice:
 * 1) Are you crazy, that's way too much functionality to make into a skin!
 * 2) Maybe that'd be doable with a skin
 * 3) Maybe you could do it with X
 * 4) You'd better have a good modern browser on that cheap phone...

If you have a moment to enumerate all that apply, and possibly give X=, I'd appreciate it. I realize it might be better to install an app on the phone or internet café computer... HLHJ (talk) 19:32, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Don't we already have somewhat decent voice recognition built into computers on an OS/desktop environment level? Would this not meet the needs of the use case described?
 * I'm not sure the website level is a reasonable place to be trying to address this, let alone such a specific part as the skins (all they do is layout). -— Isarra ༆ 20:21, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, along with a screen reader, I suppose... -— Isarra ༆ 20:38, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Dark Timeless?
Hi, I love your Timeless skin. I think it looks amazing when it's dark! I use Dark Reader with the Dynamic filter to change to what you see in the picture. It would be amazing to have an actual skin though, so every user in a wiki will use it if they don't want (or can't have) any browser extensions. Will we ever get a dark timeless skin? Thanks for the great work  MavropaliasG (talk) 16:17, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
 * While this is planned, for now please see Extension:Theme for a secure way of implementing this. -— Isarra ༆ 16:39, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you very much, looking forward to it, have a happy new year! MavropaliasG (talk) 03:08, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Timeless
Hi. On a wiki I'm using the Timeless Skin. Because I have quite a few links on the sidebar. I would like to move the Tools block to the right and another block from the CreateRedirect extension. Is that possible? --Hispano76 (talk) 03:25, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Toolbar & page header design questions
Hey Isarra — I hope you're doing well amidst the turmoil of the current moment. We met a few years ago, somewhat briefly, at the hackathon outside of Barcelona. As you may know I am currently working on the desktop improvements project. I recently starting looking more closely at the toolbar (not sure what you call that, but what I mean by toolbar is the Article, Talk, Read, Edit, etc. tabs at the top of the page) and the page header (page title, article indicators, etc.) — image here for clarification: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/M301. I noticed that in Timeless the toolbar sits below the page header. This seems to make sense from several perspectives that I can think of. I'd love to learn about why you decided to do it that way, what advantages it has, and what disadvantages (if any) it has. Also, were there alternatives you were considering? Any context and insight you can provide is much appreciated. Also please forgive me if this is already documented somewhere. Thanks, AHollender (WMF) (talk) 15:37, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Hey, sorry for the delay - hopefully this may still be helpful, though, so I'll respond now that I'm seeing it again.
 * So there's a good chance a sizable chunk of the reasoning here was just 'I've done above the firstheading and in the firstheading, let's try below the firstheading'. These are basically the three logical possibilities for typical skins, as removing them any further from the page header tends to break their connection to the page and its content specifically, but which one makes sense for any given skin is going to very much depend on the layout and visual design of the skin overall. How much navigation is above it? How does the site navigation visually interact with the content? Where are the visual barriers between the content and the chrome of the site overall, and how many are there?
 * GreyStuff puts the page tools in the firstheading because there are already several layers of navigation above, with pretty subtle barriers between them already. This is viable here because of the limited size of the toolbar here, and the nature of the target sites (minimalistic, documentation, that kind of thing), and thus makes it immediately clear they're related to the page title they're next to.
 * WoOgLeShades puts the page tools above the firstheading (like Vector and MonoBook), because despite visually attaching them to the site navigation header in this case, they are still clearly outside it, and a part of the same block as the content itself. And due to the comparingly minimal styles on most of the content itself below this, the page tools can serve as a bit of a transition where they are, while also avoiding adding visual clutter/distraction further down within the content itself.
 * Timeless puts the page tools below the firstheading because the way Timeless is styled and laid out, this doesn't visually interfere with the content, while also allowing for extra space for extra tools on sites with more complicated content and editing. It works here because each part of the interface/page has its own block separating it from the rest. The content is styled similarly to the navigation, just in the middle. The tools are with the content, arguably in it, but still outside what can actually be directly edited. We want to put them as close as feasible to the what they pertain to without adding confusion or distraction, and this case 'as close as' is practially 'in' simply because they don't stand out much.
 * So if you want to specifically aim for a particular position you can probably make any of them work if you're willing to adjust the styles around it (how much is needed may of course vary wildly), but I've generally just gone the other way and plonked them in where makes sense for the overall theme, hence why I've wound up with some of each across my own skins. -— Isarra ༆ 17:26, 18 July 2020 (UTC)