MobileFrontend/status

Last update on: 2012-02-29

2011-03-01
We're still in hiring mode looking for a great developer to lead our efforts. At the same time, we're also putting together a roadmap for our mobile development, and starting to coordinate research and development. We're drafting a survey now. 

2011-04-01
With User:Qgil's help, we created a portal on meta for all mobile projects. Alongside our software engineering efforts, a significant significant amount of ground research is being done on mobile strategy. Hiring is now almost done, including for the mobile site rewrite. Volunteer developer Vivek also continued to work on WikiSnaps for Android.

2011-05-01
We made good progress on a PHP MediaWiki extension to replace our Ruby-based mobile gateway. We hope to demo our first all-MediaWiki version, whose appearance is similar to the current gateway, at the Berlin hackathon.

2011-06-01
Patrick Reilly demoed the mobile extension at the Berlin hackathon and answered implementation concerns about a skin vs. extension (see the follow-up discussion on wikitech-l) approach. He also continued to develop the extension, notably by integrating functionality of the WAP platform, and by expanding the device detection list. A prototype will soon be set up, for which we'll need volunteers to help us test the new portal using their mobile devices.

2011-07-01
Tomasz Finc sent a call for testers to help test the prototype in English, Japanese and Hebrew. Feedback is now being addressed by the mobile team, who is tracking fixes and new feature requests in bugzilla. Patrick Reilly and Asher Feldman also worked together to profile the MobileFrontend extension (formerly "PatchOutputMobile") and prep it for deployment. Next steps include its integration with our Varnish and Squid caching architecture, so that we can have the advantages of the WURFL mobile device database with an acceptable performance.

2011-08-01
Patrick Reilly focused on proper caching support, as well as device detection optimization. Mobile device recognition on Wikimedia sites is now done server-side at the squid level, which results in faster redirect for mobile users, and better recognition of devices. A message and feedback page were set up to report false positives.

2011-08-31
Tomasz Finc sent a second call for testers to try out the new mobile platform developed by Patrick Reilly. A dedicated bug triage session was organized; the MediaWiki community also provided code feedback on the wikitech-l list, which was addressed by Patrick. Tomasz called for developers to help fix the last remaining bugs before full deployment, planned for early September. In related news, Tomasz started a discussion about using Phonegap for mobile app development.

2011-09-30
MobileFrontend was deployed in September and is now the default Wikipedia mobile experience. We've reached out to our various communities to create custom main pages, and are rolling out new ways of viewing Wikimedia projects on mobile. We also migrated our old WAP gateway traffic to MobileFrontend, so that we can serve our users from one place. Next we'll be iterating on our roadmap to guide our work.

2011-10-31
<section begin=2011-10-31 />The production version of our new Wikimedia mobile platform, launched in September, is no longer considered to be beta. Users can opt-in to the beta program to test new, pre-release features and provide feedback; future features include search suggestions and interwiki links. Phil Chang also set up a mobile features brainstorm page, and started to organize them. In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for mobile operator partners for its Wikipedia Zero program. <section end=2011-10-31 />

2011-11-30
<section begin=2011-11-30 />Phil Chang announced that all Wikimedia wikis would see their mobile version converted to the new mobile platform by the end of November, and explained how to make home pages compatible with it. This prompted a discussion about the design choice to hide any content on the main page that isn't specifically labeled for mobile display. Mobile was also a focus of the India hackathon, during which new features were developed.<section end=2011-11-30 />

2011-12-31
<section begin=2011-12-31/>We quietly launched user login alongside better support for tiered JavaScript. We also fixed long-standing issues like the locked viewport, and we updated image description pages. Finally, we deployed HTTPS support on mobile for Wikipedia, with plans to enable it for sister projects soon.<section end=2011-12-31/>

2012-02-29
<section begin=2012-02-29/>Patrick Reilly, Jon Robson, Max Semenik, and Arthur Richards all worked on refactoring MobileFrontend to make it [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-February/057936.html less Wikimedia-centric]. We also expanded our API to return pages in a mobile-friendly format and cleaned up a lot of our JavaScript and CSS code.<section end=2012-02-29/>