Project Canasta

Project Canasta is a project, begun in late 2020 by a group of MediaWiki consultants and administrators, with the goal of creating a set of MediaWiki-based "products" that can be easily installed. Those of us who make heavy use of so-called "Enterprise MediaWiki" know that it can be a powerful tool for a variety of data management purposes, including BPM, CRM, QM, etc. However, people looking for solutions in these areas will rarely think about MediaWiki as an option. If, however, dedicated, downloadable products existed that were branded as solutions for these different use cases, then MediaWiki could compete as a standard solution. In this sense, Project Canasta represents both a technical and a marketing advancement.

A "product" in this case would consist of core MediaWiki, one or more skins, a variety of necessary extensions, and a set of wiki pages that together define a data structure: categories, templates, Page Forms forms, Scribunto modules, etc.

This project will ideally involve creating, or choosing, a solution for four main components:
 * 1) A system that allows for creating a "starter installation" of MediaWiki plus some specified set of extensions and skins, possibly using Composer.
 * 2) A system that allows for publishing a downloadable version of this installation - and potentially the software environment around it, such as Apache, MySQL and PHP - using a tool like Docker or Ansible. (See /Infrastructure solution.)
 * 3) A mechanism to allow for installing wiki pages onto the resulting wiki, possibly using the Page Exchange extension.
 * 4) A set of wiki page packages to fit the various decided-on use cases.

The specific current goals of this project are:
 * Decide on a suitable download mechanism for the MediaWiki software.
 * Create software for the download/installation, or repurpose some existing software for it.
 * Decide on a mechanism for wiki page installation (potentially including some sort of built-in i18n approach).
 * Decide on an initial set of use cases to be supported.
 * Define a set of extensions, and a data structure, for each such use case.
 * Decide on the branding and marketing approach for the entire suite of products.

If you would like to join this effort, please join the Project Canasta Google Group.