Site Improvements

From WorkCDN

What site improvements would we like to have?

Contents 1 Extensions 1.1 Account synchronization 1.2 Community Augmentation 1.2.1 Dynamic Conversation 1.2.2 Community Recognition 1.3 Site Functionality 1.4 Bugs / Fixes

Extensions

There are a number of extensions to MediaWiki that we can implement. Place suggestions for which ones we could use here:

Account synchronization

If we're looking at HanClinto.com as a testbed for the new CCN site, then we might want to look at other account integrations:

• Auth Bugzilla -- allows us to share user accounts between Bugzilla and MediaWiki. This may or may not help us also look into sharing SVN accounts with Wiki credentials.
• Forum integration
  • There are many toolkits to integrate with various forums depending on what we would want to add. There's Invision Power Board, PHPBB, Simple Machines Forum, and even an impressive looking MediaWiki Bulletin Board that is developed by the WikiMedia foundation and looks to be tightly integrated with the MediaWiki paradigm. Sweet!

Community Augmentation

There are many little things that we can include to help foster as sense of community here.

Dynamic Conversation

• PHP FreeChat -- this is a different chat extension than the one already implemented, but it looks like it's the one behind this chat page, which I think is a bit smoother of an implementation (as a special page rather than a tab up top, and has customizable rooms, though our current one may as well).
• Talk Here -- "The TalkHere extension shows the talk page of each article at the bottom of the article page; this provides a way for users to post comments to articles prominently, even if they are not allowed to edit the article page itself. The TalkHere extension also provides an on-page editor to add comments (requires AJAX support)."
• Postcomment -- "The Postcomment extension allows users to post comments directly to discussion pages directly from a form at the bottom of each discussion page." -- this could make managing of discussion pages a bit easier.

Community Recognition

• New User Log -- "Newuserlog creates a log of new user accounts in reverse chronological order. If an account is created by a logged-in user, then this extension records the creation of the account and who created it."
• Social Rewarding -- "The focus is laid on generating benefits for users in order to achieve a higher contribution rate in a wiki system. Therefore, social rewarding mechanisms are implemented to reward people contributing to an online community. In an online community social rewarding is in the majority of cases based on accentuation of the most active members. For example, ranking of users' activities ("top contributors"). In this extension four techniques has been designed: "Amount of References", "Most Viewed Articles", "Rating of Articles", and a "Recommender System"."

Alternatively, we could just try going with a simpler method for now with:

• Special User Score -- "For a smaller installation of MediaWiki it may be useful, to watch, who are the most active users. This special page shows the list of users sorted by the number of contributions."

Site Functionality

• Namespace Permissions -- For a while, Torque Developer Network used namespaces to restrict access to various sections of the Wiki for people who didn't have the proper credentials. I think that this could be a good solution for developers (such as JetSpice) who want to use the Wiki for private collaborative development, and don't necessarily want to share all of their documents with the public. I've looked through a few content protection systems, and this one seems to be one of the simpler, more reliable, and easy-to-use.
• Bible Ref -- allows us to more easily make references to Bible Gateway for scripture links. If it allows quoting of the text that would be best, but I'm not sure what its capabilities are.
  • BibleRef only turns your references into a link
  • the ESV offers an api that allows the inserting of text. But we would have to write the extension ourselves. http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/share/services/api/
• Syntax Hilighting -- There are several code syntax-hilighting extensions -- this one in particular is nice because it allows inclusion of external files (such as retrieved through SVN, etc) in addition to locally pasted text.
  • ADDED: Syntax Highlighting has been added. But I used GeSHi instead. See Help for details.--Samw3 16:11, 13 November 2007 (EST)

Bugs / Fixes

• FIXED: line of undefine's while editing --Samw3 13:43, 13 November 2007 (EST)