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. It would likely make use of Docker in some way to allow for downloading the software (and potentially the software environment around it, including PHP, MySQL, and so on). Wiki pages would be installed via some automated mechanism, potentially the Page Exchange extension.

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.