Wikimedia blog maintenance/status

Last update on: 2012-01-31

2011-03-31
After assessing the current situation of Wikimedia blogs, Guillaume Paumier worked with the Communications team, and other departments, to collect requirements. A technical proposal was then created and a prototype set up. Implementation should now happen shortly.

2011-04-30
Rob Halsell set up a test blog and documented the blog our configuration management system. This will facilitate backups and redeployment, and further streamlining and automating our operations processes. Technical issues with the back-end delayed the implementation, but Rob resolved them with Ryan Lane's help. Deployment happened on May 7 and went smoothly. This project is considered completed, even though we'll continue to improve the blogs incrementally in the future (read more).

2011-11-30
Guillaume Paumier fixed bugs and made tweaks to the theme, which is still hosted on github (until Wikimedia switches to git). There are plans to host a prototype blog in Wikimedia Labs to facilitate testing of new functionality.

2011-12-31
Guillaume Paumier continued to [//github.com/gpaumier/WP-Victor/commits/master fix bugs] in the blog's theme, and started to develop a WordPress plugin to bring functionality specific to the Wikimedia blog independently of the theme (for example, expanding the group of users who can upload files).

2012-01-31
The new WMBlog plugin (which brings functionality specific to the Wikimedia blog independently of the theme) was deployed in January, as well as tweaks to the [//github.com/gpaumier/WP-Victor/ theme]. Due to the SOPA/PIPA blackout-related traffic, the Operations team moved the blog to a newer, more powerful server and added caching layers (Varnish & Memcached), and Guillaume Paumier fixed the blog's theme to paginate comments. Guillaume also fixed issues with attachment pages, and created a custom "meta" widget that adds a link to the Wikimedia blog guidelines to the WordPress standard meta widget.