User:Loonybomber

North America. Pacific Northwest. developer for Humboldt Mediation Services, a California 501(c)(3) charitable organization providing mediation as an alternative to recourse to the Judicial system.

The goal of my project is to provide forms to allow entry level computer users with minimal knowledge of interacting with computers in general to (1) create web-pages announcing events of two types (a) fundraising events and (b) training and workshop events, (2) receive registrations for training and workshop events from the public, (3) maintain a library of training documents or uploaded files and for developing manuals, fliers, posters, publicity and outreach documents, (4) send email to registered site users and to groups of site users, (5) input contact details for sponsors, donors, suppliers, affiliated organizations, (6) create, assign, and update the status of projects and tasks, (7) provide a gateway for making donations and fees charged for trainings and workshops, and (8) synthesize or aggregate the information into pages presented to anonymous users along with a typical organization websites static content, about us, etc.

A sub-goal of this project is to document the process to (1) help facilitate collaboration or assistance with the main project, and, (2) point out, demonstrate, and help to develop user-level, non-programmers', entry level tutorials for. A sub-sub goal is to explore my ability to contribute to .org.

If my memory serves me -- it was over ten years ago I played around with MediaWiki for a couple of months and then dropped it entirely until only recently -- non-programmers have trouble creating forms to create pages, to view created pages, and to add and delete information from pages. It is a tricky thing and as I draft this I am still waiting for the brainstorm that allowed me to put it all together in my head ten years ago to occur. It seems as if you need to struggle with Semantic forms and mess around with extensions such as Header Tabs, and just plain experiment with transclusion before you will be able to use MediaWiki close to it's potential.

I'd like to be able to jump right in and develop a website without having to do a whole lot of experimenting to figure out what I need to do the next time I develop a site.

Versions Used With this Project
MediaWiki 1.25.1

PHP 5.6.9 (apache2handler)

MySQL 5.5.43

Vagrant w/ persoid
Vagrant is the optimal way to get Persoid running, which is necessary for the user friendly interface. Ref. Coverage of this topic should perhaps be first in sequence, except that installing and configuring vagrant (a wonderful open source project  relies on) is pragmatically unrelated to the use of   software. See Vagrant FreeBSD Persoid SMW.

Extensions
Table of Extensions Used with this Project

Basic Letter
The basic letter demonstrates using form input to create a page with information entered on a form with structured categories and semantic properties, namespace and title restrictions using the create box extension and semantic forms to create a MediaWiki page formatted as a letter with a letterhead, address fields, body, signature line, enclosure and copy correspondence listings. A form containing header tabs is used to create, view, and manage pages maintained in a letters/ sub-folder.


 * 1) You start by creating a page and formatting it as a letter with fields named for use with forms and as a template.
 * 2) You use semantic forms to create a form based on the template made in step 1.