Thread:Project:Support desk/Class paper/reply (8)

Thanks for all of your help. If possible I will make this the last post. It has been difficult to find broad, serious, business and technical subjects that are not covered in the documentation. I’m afraid that the following questions are mostly speculative. Would it be fair to describe MediaWiki as, “a media server that provides facilities for collaboration in the creation and maintenance of its content”? (I know it does lots more) Is there a graphic for MediaWiki showing the index, API, load, redirect, WebStart, LocalSettings, etc. (or some other) components? Does MediaWiki use any ‘languages’ internally (not counting extensions) beyond SQL, HTML, XML, JavaScript, and PHP with JSON? Are there any plans for extending database connectivity beyond SQLite, MySQL and Postgres? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:User_rights#List_of_groups Regarding $wgGroupPermissions in LocalSettings.php, does the MediaWiki development team use any custom groups, or are the standard groups sufficient? Are there plans to provide a configuration application for LocalSettings.php or other configuration tasks? In regard to VisualEditor, was the possibility of using an existing WYSIWYG HTML editor, such as IceApe’s Composer, considered? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_Matrix/stable Upon further reading, the following questions may be covered by the PageMover object mentioned at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_guidelines#Design_principles or the Web API interface. Extensions provide an amazingly flexible interface for developers. Is there any thought of providing an interface for more advanced client-side applications (modules) to be securely attached by the user rather than the developer? I’m thinking of the Java CORBA and/or RMI implementations, as an example, but any standard with encryption after initial sign-on would be fine. If the MediaWiki/module interface was limited to the read/edit/upload/navigate level, the data exchanges could be minimized as much as possible. This would definitely separate UI and business logic. What am I missing?

So, that’s it. I’ll say thanks-in-advance for any answers I get, in order to minimize my contribution to the noise level. Ralph