User:Vldandrew

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=What is like to be a newcomer to Wikimedia's tech community ?= Over the years I had used Wikipedia. Yet, I had no idea that there was an entire foundation behind. Hence, I knew nothing about Wikimedia nor about its technical side. I first acknowledge the existence of Wikimedia's technical world from Google Code-In contest. First, I was on a road to learn more about this. My ambition was to pick up more about the technical world behind Wikipedia. The links provided in at GCI contest is where I started from. Among the pages I found a software called MediaWiki. My interest in this software was raised by some facts I'll describe shortly. During the process of installation,environment setup and developing extensions part I had encountered different problems. Most of them caused by my negligence because I was mostly anxious to move to the next step. Before all this to happen I did not even know what Mediawiki is.

With the passing time I learned that Mediawiki is a web-based wiki software application first used to run Wikipedia. Which was one of the things that raised my curiosity.The installation page was easy to find from there. My first impression was that the installation might be not as easy as I first thought. That, maybe because it would not be a "two clicks installation". Perhaps, that is why some may say that its installation is relatively more complicated. And that is why before anything I joined an official IRC channel. For my surprise, the prime part of the installation guide was easy to follow. Most of that part consisted in using terminal commands.

The first steps were easy to follow but by mistake I haven't looked over the installation requirements and guess what..? I ended without setting up a database. It took me some time to figure that out but after chatting with someone on irc I was ready to go again. After taking a small brake I started working again on setting mediawiki up but then at the next step I was stuck again. This time I searched for the answer myself, it took me thirty minutes to figure out that I had not set up any local server or sent them to a remote server .The installations part wasn't as hard as I first tough even though it made me some problems, all of them were from my mistakes and because I was new to this kind of work. Now I was at the initial configuration part, which was from my point of view the easiest part in the process. I can not say the same about the further customizations because It took me a hour and a half to read all the pages about this and another problem was that every page was pointing to at least six more pages, it was like it will never end. Also for this part I had to play with PHP code. In the end I managed to enable Image uploads,subpages and a few more features just from a few lines of code, which made me happy because before I read three manuals: System administration, Configuration and Administrators and I haven't added nothing to my wiki.There was one more step in the installation guide, installing extensions. This is when I made my wiki inaccessible. There was a caution message on the wiki page, one that I missed and once again I was at an impasse. To resolve this problem I deleted everything and started from the beginning again, this time it was easier and it familiar. This time I thought myself how I messed up at these simple steps and how stupid I was not to read everything from the instructions. In the end I managed to install and unistall extensions without problems.Now, after installing and setting up everything I headed up to the "Developing extensions" page mainly because I wanted to practice and improve my programming skill and I am always grateful when I have the option to do something new, and making an extension is definitely something new for me. This time I knew that I have to read everything and always read the Warnings. However for my it wasn't as hard as I first thought, it was easier than I would have ever imagined... There was an wiki article about this with a "hello world" example, by the time I finished reading the page I already knew a lot about how to make extensions. At the end of the day I knew how to make extensions and ideas for extensions, for example I thought about an emoticon which was already mad and an syntax error extension since I have found only syntax highlight.

In conclusion, I started from knowing almost nothing about Wikimedia's technical world to making extensions for one of it's softwares, I had encountered problems but I resolved them with the help of the community and learned something that might help me in the future.