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Wiki Is Power; Power Is Wiki
Gideon Weems
Member #3,925
October 2003

This is a continuation of Looking for someone to help with the wiki!

The wiki is important! I hope everyone agrees. The wiki is also online but currently cannot accept edits, as MediaWiki's interface for authentication changed in 1.27. The change is for the better, but it does mean we need to write a plugin. There are two sides to this problem--the wiki side (MediaWiki) and the A.cc side (Single Sign On... i.e. OpenID?), so state your experience. Thomas is busy programming a new baby, last I heard.

I have a running installation of MediaWiki on localhost, which took an afternoon to set up, but know nothing of SSO.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:AuthManager
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:SessionManager_and_AuthManager/Updating_tips

As far as I can tell, this is what we'll be writing:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgSessionProviders

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
avatar

Is it not possible to forego upgrading to 1.27, or perhaps downgrade to an earlier version in which the authentication worked with allegro.cc?

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I have a running installation of MediaWiki on localhost, which took an afternoon to set up, but know nothing of SSO.

I got about as far from the sounds of it, but haven't had time to dig into the relevant modules or ask ML for the SSO documentation.

Append:

Is it not possible to forego upgrading to 1.27, or perhaps downgrade to an earlier version in which the authentication worked with allegro.cc?

It seems that MediaWiki isn't really organized for customization so well... I mean, even just to install it you have to generate and edit PHP files right in the middle of the source. I imagine that the existing installation is just a hack to get it running and hasn't been properly separated from MediaWiki or tracked/maintained so it's probably a hassle just to get it running again... That's just my impression from what has been said so far. That's PHP or you.

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
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bamccaig said:

It seems that MediaWiki isn't really organized for customization

This is a bit extreme, but would it potentially be better if we were to write our own wiki software? Something tailored to our needs would surely be better than a one-size-fits-all solution.

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

We need a wiki... how does a wiki not fit our needs? The only question is whether we need mediawiki or if something much simpler like a github wiki would do: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

With the added benefit that we could just use our existing free hosting for it and not need a custom server. Of course there would be no way to use allegro.cc SSO (which may not be possible anyway).

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
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Using GitHub's wiki is an interesting idea. I like that. Of course, it would not be linked to allegro.cc accounts, but anyone with a GitHub account could make edits very easily.

The only issue I foresee with using GitHub's wiki is if Allegro ever moves away from GitHub, or if GitHub closes in the near future. These are not too likely though.

Gideon Weems
Member #3,925
October 2003

It sounds like we should determine the importance of unifying A.cc and wiki accounts. Personally, I think it is convenient. If it prevents us from having an editable wiki, however, I would rather have separate accounts.

bamccaig said:

I got about as far from the sounds of it, but haven't had time to dig into the relevant modules or ask ML for the SSO documentation.

He tends to chime in, when topics appear in this section. Thomas might also have information or at least some code that was working pre-1.27.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

I do like the idea of using GitHub's wiki if there's a way to export the data and back it up. It saves us the trouble of maintaining a server, and we really don't need fancy features anyway. It would be ideal if we could also import our existing wiki content, but perhaps Tomasu could export it and we could script it up? If I'm not mistaken, isn't GitHub's wiki accessible through Git? Or am I thinking of some other platform?

Append:

https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pages-locally/

Sounds good to me. The only hitch with trying to import existing Wiki articles is probably that links and things won't match 1:1. We can always do our best to automate repairs and then leave future repairs as an exercise to the reader.

Append:

There may be a hitch. I cannot seem to clone liballeg/allegro5.wiki.git. It seems the permissions for that are still locked down to contributors, so you'd probably have to clone the repo into your own account, then make changes to the wiki, then submit a pull request? I'm not sure. It's something we need to answer first.

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

github.com/liballeg has its wiki disabled - you can just use any of your own github projects to try out the wiki if you like.

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
avatar

Even if the existing wiki content can not be automatically exported to GitHub, I do not think it would take too long to manually copy/paste it over. I would gladly volunteer to do this, if the need arises.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

I think that it's possible to make wikis publicly editable:

{"name":"610858","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/2\/22f020f84f4eadc24939e35d45b7d7dd.png","w":742,"h":188,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/2\/22f020f84f4eadc24939e35d45b7d7dd"}610858

So that should work fine. :)

Append:

I did just think of a potential annoyance though. All existing wiki links will be broken if we move the wiki to a new platform... That is kind of annoying. I don't suppose it would easy to setup redirect rules... Perhaps we could create a wiki page that maps old to new though and maybe wiki.allegro.cc could redirect to that page?

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

It wouldn't take much work to write a session plugin for mediawiki, I'm just short on time, though I have a bit more now that the project i'm on has slowed down a bit.

So please, if someone could write the plugin, I'd help with it. Or I'll "Get around to it" sometime "soon".

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

I suppose the first step would be to find the old SSO code and extract the necessary info from it...

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

I still have it. May still have the pdf for the docs, but I'm not sure.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

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