User talk:Trevor Parscal (WMF)/Archive 1

InputBox
Sorry for my stupidity for marking that bug as unresolved. I just couldn't see any evidence that it was fixed. I am new to this stuff, so could you tell me when MediaWiki and Wikipedia are likely to be updated with the latest versions of this extension? Thanks, Msgj 19:05, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
 * No worries. I created Extension:SearchBox so in hopes that people will start using it instead of InputBox - as it's much more consistent with the more modern way of doing things, and is much less messy. Trevor Parscal 18:30, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Can you tell me who I can contact to ask when Wikipedia will be updated with your bug fix? Because it's causing problems. Thanks. Msgj 18:51, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
 * If you need attention to your project's needs, you may have some success on our IRC channel (#mediawiki on irc.freenode.net) where many of our developers both staff and volunteers are present. Trevor Parscal

A smaller interface?
Hello Trevor, great extension! It fits my needs perfectly except for one minor detail. The wiki site that I am trying to add this extension to would require the 5 stars to be smaller, would this be possible as an extra option? What about even changing the stats from "2.3 / 5 (7 votes cast)" to "2.3 (7)" or even simply "(7)" since the 2.3 would be reflected in the amount of yellow shading in the stars?

Thanks :)


 * Glad to see you like the extension. It needs a serious overhaul I think, specifically porting it to jQuery and away from the sajax implementation in favor of a proper API call. Additionally it may be reasonable to disable it completely for browsers without JavaScript and make it an entirely dynamic widget, which loads it's data from the server at run-time (caching on the API call is difficult here). To your point, making it theme-able would be awesome, and ideally this could be done by adjusting CSS only... As I said, it needs some love. If you are interested in poking at it I would be glad to offer some support where possible. Trevor Parscal 03:33, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Extension:CommunityVoice
Any example wikis where this is being used? Just want to check it out in a real situation. Thanks. -- Dr DBW |  talk  05:15, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
 * We designed it for and have now deployed it on usability.wikimedia.org where we are gathering information about existing extensions which provide usability improvements to MediaWiki. Take a look at the extension nomination page where the community has been helping to create a list of such extensions which will then be analyzed and reported on in hopes of capturing the successes and failures therein. Trevor Parscal 22:11, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Please note
ExtensionTalk:CommunityVoice

talk
Extension talk:ContributionStatistics

Minor Vector Skin Niggle
Hi Trevor, Good work with the Vector skin, I've changed to using it on en.wp (now its properly live!). I've just got one little niggle with it.

When on discussion pages, I think that having the "+" to add a new section on the arrow drop down menu isn't the most intuitive, and is quite out of the way...

Not sure what others think, but I think it'd be better having it next to edit or something (as a plus).

What do you think?

Cheers

Reedy 00:07, 5 July 2009 (UTC)


 * We've moved the Add Topic tab to the top level tabs (if there's enough room on your screen). Trevor Parscal 07:09, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I need help!
[[Category: == Hi, Mr.Trevor Parscal, i am someone who signed up the "do you have an hour to help" activity which will have an interview on the 14th and the 15th in San Francisco. I still didn't receive any notice or respond from you guys(or whoever is taking care of this). I really want to get involved into this activity, so please let me know ASAP when is my interview date. Thanks so much for helping me :) The way to contact me is via email:tankaiming560@yahoo.com.cn ==

Thank you so much for your interest and offer! The Usability Team was so pleased there was such interest. Due to the large number of responses, we cannot bring everyone interested in to participate. If there are opportunities for you to be involved in future interviews and studies, we will certainly reach out to you. Thanks again --Parul Vora on behalf of the Usability Team

Contribution Tracking
Hi Trevor. My father visited this page and has some problems with it (it was linked in a mailing list post). From Special:Version's entry "Contribution Tracking" I guess this special page is provided by the extension Contribution Tracking and you're the right person to talk to. For a normal user, the page is pretty hard to understand, mainly because of two reason: Both points should be super easy to fix by adding a short description text. --Avatar 10:11, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * There is no legend. You can't see at a glance what red, green, blue is meant to visualize.
 * There's no hint that the graphic uses a on-mouse-over technique.

Beautiful graph but I agree with the person above. If this will be used again in the future, it would be nice to see a small legend added. Untoldpromise 06:55, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Help with LogEntry
I'm running MW 1.16b3 on PHP 5.3 (MAMP on Mac OS), and just tried using LogEntry. I'm also using Vector.

I assumed it was necessary to activate in the usual way in LocalSettings, which I did.

Still, the  tag seemed to do nothing. It remained visible after everything.

Got any ideas that could help me get it working?

CommunityVoice - Unknown extension tag "ratings:scale"
Something is causing the CommunityVoice extension to not properly register itself in my installation. I've tried the version that was part of 1.15.4 tag. Then I checked SVN and saw that there was a new revision, I grabbed that. I'm getting the same problem for that one, too. Either I'm doing something wrong, or maybe there is a conflict with something else I have loaded?

Here are the extensions I have loaded, in order. I use a file $IP/extensions/installed.php rather than modifying the global configuration file. Allows an extension directory to be shared between multiple parallel instances of MediaWiki, with the same extension configuration, even if they have different LocalSettings.php (which they would have to).

All the extensions before CommunityVoice work fine.

I went to Special:Version, and it shows that CommunityVoice is installed, but it does not show the tag under Parser extension tags.

I created the supporting DB table first as the default, and then I thought maybe it was honoring the $wgDBprefix, so I re-created it with the prefix. Neither made a difference. I'd really like to enable this feature, but I can't. Any ideas? If you do, a note to me at John at Irie dash Inc dot com would be greatly appreciated.

-- John

Update Version
Hey sorry but,you know, "How updated version 1.15.1 of MediaWiki ? Please Reply in my disscusion. KnuxD 21:00, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Usability Initiative toolbar in RTL languages
Hi, I would like to get the new toolbar to work on a Hebrew installation of MediaWiki, in an organization heavily using MSIE7. The new toolbar does not appear under these settings. I'd like to enable it, and join any work that's being done on shqashing whatever bugs are in it. Is anybody presently working on this? Can you please put me in touch with them?

Ethan1701 13:42, 7 September 2010 (UTC)


 * There's a compatibility map in jquery.wikiEditor.js which can be tweaked if you want to try your luck. The bugs in IE6 and IE7 have to do with CSS layout issues, because their behavior of floating in right-to-left mode is broken. The only way I see to fix this is to not rely on floating, which causes other issues, such as the toolbar no longer being able to automatically wrap in narrow browsers. Thoughts are welcome - see us in #wikimedia-dev if you like. Trevor Parscal 19:00, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Help with ResourceLoader
I left a help request at Talk:ResourceLoader/Documentation/Using_with_extensions. I updated ResourceLoader from the trunk, up to 74692, the edit you made about an hour ago. Still having the same problem. If you can fix it, I'd be happy to help out writing the documentation for ResourceLoader. MrC 22:49, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Rename user accounts
Hi!

Could you rename my user accounts at usabilitywiki (where you are bureaucrat), as requested on en.wikipedia? Thanks Helder 11:59, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Extension:Drafts with Semantic Forms
I was searching for "Save and Continue", asked on #mediawiki, and was happy to be informed of Drafts. Great extension for our engineering organization. Is there a way to enable it while editing using Semantic Mediawiki Forms? I wasn't sure if was just a namespace issue or not, and I'm still too new to this stuff to tell whether I could modify any rights in Drafts.php that would let it show up in the Form namespace. Thanks. --Skew 06:07, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I did not design it to specifically work or not work in the way you are describing. It is a very simple piece of code, I'm sure it can be tweaked to suit your case. There has recently been an effort to get the JS up to date, and there's some more work needed to use the API rather than the deprecated ajax interface of MediaWiki - but generally the software is ready for production, and in some cases has already been used as such. Trevor Parscal 17:51, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

ResourceLoader kills JS
Hi. A few days ago I upgraded a wiki to 1.17 trunk, and it seems all custom JavaScript had stopped running. Common.js and user javascript (with $wgAllowUserJs enabled) do not run at all, nor does the edit toolbar. It seems to load with ResourceLoader, but seems to not actually run for any user. I've kept updating to trunk with no change. Have I missed something which needs to be enabled or changed for the upgrade to 1.17 with ResourceLoader? Thanks - Gboyers 12:03, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Generalizing WikiEditor tricks?
Hi,

I'm fascinated by the potential I found used on the Semantic Mediawiki apparently using your WikiEditor extension which uses an iframe with contenteditable. I'm particularly interested in how you got it to allow events (at least click), given that in my own demoing, events do not seem to work inside the iframe when I tried execCommand (insertHTML).

I see enormous potential here (at least I hope there is) for things like IDEs with code folding, mini-widgets which one can add to one's HTML5-based sticky notes (e.g., calendars, icons pointing to files to upload, etc.).

Can you just summarize the general tricks used to get this to work and/or to generalize the code you are writing for this extension to be used in other environments? I would really appreciate it (the former alone would be just great).

Thanks! Brettz9 05:06, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The iframe implementation in WikiEditor is experimental - it's not very stable, and it because there simply aren't enough "tricks" available to overcome the issues of contentEditable. Google docs no longer uses this approach, and for good reason, it's very buggy, unstable and inconsistent in all browsers. That said, we were hooking into dom events within an iframe which had a contentEditable=true attribute on the body, nothing particularly special there - and in many browsers certain events were not possible to capture. You may want to look into alternatives if you want to take this technology very far (like code folding or IDEs). Mini-widgets could probably work, but doing anything really complicated quickly becomes a black hole. Trevor Parscal 19:34, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

CollapsibleNav
Hi Trevor,

I installed UsabilityInitiative Extension, and have mwdiawiki 1.16.1 with vector skin. Everything is working fine but the EXPANDABLE/COLLAPSABLE side bar!!! Could you please help me with this?

Thanks, Feb 15, 2011

Sandy


 * You will need to make sure it's turned on for everyone by default probably. Take a look at the Vector/Vector.php file http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/wmf/1.16wmf4/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/Vector/Vector.php?view=markup - it has a config variable ($wgVectorModules) that should be initially set to on by default, users can turn it off - but your configuration may vary. Trevor Parscal 23:33, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

-- Trevor, I have those too, they are all set to true, but still no lock. Any thing else I may need to change? Is there any seperate css or js that I need to add some where?

Thanks very much for your help,

Sandy Feb 18, 2011 -- Hi, anyone can help with this problem? mw 1.16.1 using vector skin and installed and configured usabilityinitiative, but the side bar has not changed at all! not collapsible...

Autosave on Draft extension
Trevor,

Thanks for providing this extension. Is there any way to configure the extension to autosave after a specified period, regardless of whether there has been activity? If I constantly type for 30 minutes (without any inactivity) it would appear the extension does not autosave. I am keen to configure the wiki to protect work every minute during typing. Thanks. MattW 09:17, 14 April 2011 (UTC)


 * No, but you can add that feature, it's open source after all! Trevor Parscal 18:59, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

p-personal styling
Hi Trevor. We chatted on IRC and asked your opinion about using dividers between the Personal links (bug / screen). I'd like to expand a bit on that (as IRC isn't really suited). I really do think the dividers are an improvement over undiscernably-seperated links; it makes navigation a bit easier. The dividers are also so faint that you don't even notice them until you look at the menu. Having the same color as the dividers in the sidebar, it also makes the personal menu more part of Vector instead of looking like some 'added' links. I even got some positive responses on enwiki.

You can try it with my code (at the bottom). I really think you'll get used to it within the hour. In any case, do leave a comment at bugzilla so it won't stay in limbo forever. Thanks.  — Edokter  ( talk ) — 01:31, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Menu-Tabs toggler
Hi Trevor. I'd love to hear your overall comments on the menu-tabs toggle script I wrote, which is basically an improvement on CollapsibleTabs, and may fit very well in the Vector extension. It is now a gadget on enwiki, or you can import it from en:User:Edokter/MenuTabsToggle.js. What is left on my wishlist is to find out if mw.addPortletLink has some callback functionality that I can hook into, as the only problem remaining is that portlet links added to empty portlets afterwards are not included.  — Edokter  ( talk ) — 12:58, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Extension:ArticleEmblems
Hi Trevor, since ArticleEmblems has been deleted from SVN, I've moved the extension page into your user space at User:Trevor Parscal\Extension:ArticleEmblems. Thanks Johnduhart 02:20, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Skin-Synagonism
Hi, I modified skin-vector, which, in my opinion!, greatly improves readability of mediawiki-pages. You can find it at SourceForge. Your comments are welcome! -- Synagonism 09:25, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Software used for diagrams?
Hi Trevor,

Would you mind telling me what software you used to create the diagrams here? I see "Adobe ImageReady" in the metadata, but I assume that's just used to make it web-ready.

Thanks, --FreedomFighterSparrow (talk) 22:02, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I used Adobe Illustrator. The original source file is an SVG, but I used Adobe Illustrator's "save as for web" to export them. That feature was transplanted from ImageReady into Illustrator a while back. Trevor Parscal (talk) 22:48, 13 March 2012 (UTC)