User:Sohom Datta/Bi Weekly Report 2

From mediawiki.org

A really great and fun-filled community bonding period has come to a close. Personally, it's been great to learn about how MediaWiki functions and how various systems work in tandem with each other. Whenever I step backwards and try to visualize the whole software I feel a realization about the enormous amount of work and time that went into the creation of this.

Work[edit]

The third week started with me doing a deep dive into ResourceLoader and how it works. While figuring out how I would start implementing the widget, we realized that there wasn't any particular indication of which input field expected/contained the <pagelist> tag in the Index: edit pages. Most wikis use the "pages" parameter, however it is entirely possible to completely omit that field or to use a field with a different name. This was a bit of a bummer 'cause we expected that we would be able to identify the field that contains the <pagelist> tag and replace that field with a different widget that allows us to progressively enhance the text field. After some deliberation we decided that the best compromise would be to ask individual wikis to set the data field to "pagelist" in their MediaWiki:ProofreadPage index data config for that particular template parameter.

In the fourth week, I did a deep dive into OOUI, how everything works together especially how one can create a widget in PHP and then progressively enhance it using JS. I also submitted my first patch related to the Google Summer of Code project (this one). The patch was related to setting up selenium tests on the ProofreadPage repository, turns out that two other GSOC projects were also regarding selenium. Got lots of great feedback and it certainly felt great collaborating with Soham Parekh and Vidhi Mody.

Going forward, the I will be working on creating a patch which should allow a bare-bones version of the OOUI widget that will be built to be availiable for public testing. Stay safe and rock on ! :)