Extension talk:Page Exchange

This is the talk page for the Page Exchange extension.

Bug tracker
Is there any? Alex Mashin (talk) 19:15, 1 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Not yet, unfortunately - just this talk page. Yaron Koren (talk) 01:52, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

This extension is a good idea
For some time I thought about the idea of "git for wikis", and now you have done it. It is a big achievement, and is likely to be useful, especially for wiki farms.

I have several ideas: Alex Mashin (talk) 03:54, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Is it necessary to define packages in ? Why can't they be stored in the database, or, better, in the pages of a special namespace, perhaps, with its own data model?
 * A locally defined package can exist without its remote source. The pages that have to be downloaded and updated can either be listed locally; or their list can be extracted from a certain remote page, like a category, using text parsing tools similar to ones provided by External Data. The latter option requires extending package syntax to make it "dynamic".
 * Sources of data for a package don't even need to be wikis.
 * Another interesting topic is preprocessing foreign texts before their import. Thinking along these lines, I recently made a server-side wikifier tool (as a Lua module) that reproduces the behaviour of the current version of its JavaScript prototype.
 * "Pushing" packages to remote wikis could be interesting, although it will require authentication. Again, before pushing, texts can be preprocessed, and a package can define push requests other than using remote wiki's API.
 * If this extension develops according to these ideas, it can come to a point, when some of its code will become common with External Data. That may require librarisation.


 * I'm glad you like the concept of this extension! And I hope you get to try it out yourself, if you haven't already. To be clear, packages are not defined in LocalSettings.php - they are only installed there. Packages are defined in JSON files that can be located anywhere on the web, and they don't need to be connected to a wiki at all.


 * What would be the benefit of preprocessing? Are you talking about translation?


 * "Pushing" is indeed interesting, especially for a wiki farm that might have hundreds of wikis whose data structures all need to be updated. Maybe the simplest approach to this is to create a Page Exchange API action that lets you update a package on a wiki from the command line - then you could have a script to update any combination of wikis at the same time. Yaron Koren (talk) 13:17, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Alex Mashin (talk) 13:31, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
 * To be clear, packages are not defined in LocalSettings.php — I think it is not necessary even to list packages in LocalSettings.php, if a package definition, be it a mere URL of a remote package or something more detailed like a list of pages, exists somewhere in the wiki database or on a dedicated page.
 * By preprocessing I mean, mainly, conversion of non-wiki texts into wiki markup or a reverse operation, when a page is "pushed" to a non-wiki site.