Talk:BarebonesMediaWiki

Thanks for writing this proposal. I think for microsites in general, the following issues have to be considered:


 * discoverability decreases and maintenance cost increases the more individually configured sites there are;
 * community participation tends to be inherently more difficult with new wikis.

Therefore I think any individual new site proposed has to be judged on its merits, and UX is only one consideration driving the acceptance of a specific proposal for a new site. With regard to specific features needed for such a microsite framework, I think translation is easily the most complex one. The proposal seems to dilute the distinction between page translation (pages in the wiki) vs. software localization. The latter is indeed handled by TranslateWiki, while the former is typically handled by uses of the Translate extension in a specific wiki.

I'm not aware of any workflow that makes it easy to translate pages in a public community wiki while publishing them to a less public wiki. It's possible that fundraising has optimized these workflows already. I suggest contacting Language Engineering and Fundraising about this aspect in particular.

In general, I would recommend identifying a first microsite to try this with, and more clearly defining who the recommended implementers for the proposal are.--Eloquence (talk) 22:40, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with identifying a first microsite, given that the two concrete examples (donate and SOPA banner) were trivial to implement without the need for a BarebonesMediaWiki. And SOPA was a complete one-off, so finding ways to duplicate it doesn't seem like a priority.
 * For documents such as the Annual Report, it'd be helpful if you could identify problems with the PDF and/or wiki version, particularly those that would be large enough to warrant someone taking extra time to create a third version (because we'd then have PDF, wiki, bare-wiki versions).
 * Broadly, a bit of CSS can handle nearly any use-case, I think. I'm not sure what else is needed here. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:14, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

re: Some Questions
You should probably look at our skinning and user rights interfaces… Most of this page (at least most of the "core" stuff) can already be done with a plain MediaWiki installation, and only a very little bit of it would need new or improved extensions. Peachey88 (talk)