Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 10:34 pm Post subject: Template woes, an interim hack, and a future solution
The old NeoMainPageVer template was never designed to be used with EA/Beta versions, though over time we've started to do that. It actually works fine with those types of releases in all cases except one: the link to the announcement. The announcement link was showing up as "Beta.html read the announcement" linking to http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/press_releases/NeoOffice_3.3 This is because MediaWiki external-link syntax separates the URL from the link text by a space, and the current version number, 3.3 Beta, obviously includes a space.
In the interim, I've added a second (groan) template, NeoMainPageVerLink, to handle just the link case, set its value to "3.3_Beta", and updated all of the various "Words" pages to use it.
There's a better way to fix it, which is to use the "urlencode" MW parser function when we use that template for the link URL; in a current MediaWiki version, it can generate an underscore-friendly output string, e.g. change "3.3 Beta" into "3.3_Beta" automatically at page generation. Unfortunately, our MW version is too old; the current NeoWiki uses only a "+" to urlencode spaces.
So at some point in the future (when other workload is light), we probably want to upgrade to a newer MW version. I don't know what else current MW versions will break (the last MW update broke some of our complex formatting constructs), so it's not a priority, and it will need some thorough QA when we do it.
But for the moment, there's no broken link any longer; we just have to update two templates with variant forms (on Beta releases) of the versions number every release, instead of just one…
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 10958 Location: California, USA
Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2012 10:35 pm Post subject: Re: Template woes, an interim hack, and a future solution
sardisson wrote:
There's a better way to fix it, which is to use the "urlencode" MW parser function when we use that template for the link URL; in a current MediaWiki version, it can generate an underscore-friendly output string, e.g. change "3.3 Beta" into "3.3_Beta" automatically at page generation. Unfortunately, our MW version is too old; the current NeoWiki uses only a "+" to urlencode spaces.
Thank you for fixing this. I realize that a second template is not ideal but my experience is that getting it to work is sometimes messy. I added your new template to the list of templates to update in the NeoOffice 3.3 Beta Release Tasks so that I will remember to update that new template when NeoOffice 3.3 is released.
sardisson wrote:
So at some point in the future (when other workload is light), we probably want to upgrade to a newer MW version. I don't know what else current MW versions will break (the last MW update broke some of our complex formatting constructs), so it's not a priority, and it will need some thorough QA when we do it.
We probably should upgrade the MediaWiki code at some point. All of our NeoWiki code customizations are marked so after things settle down Ed or I can tag our existing modified MediaWiki code that we have in a source code repository, merge our code changes into the latest MediaWiki version, and then put the updated code in our NeoWiki test server so that you can look for obvious breakages.
Once we get time to do that upgrade and you are then able to test the upgrade using our test site, we can then push the upgraded code to the production NeoWiki.
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This is because MediaWiki external-link syntax separates the URL from the link text by a space, and the current version number, 3.3 Beta, obviously includes a space.
