Topic on Project talk:New contributors/Roadmap

The current listed plan is to create a new MediaWiki extension that will enable all information relating to a specific "Node" (interested users, relevant bug reports, related events and news, etc.) to be aggregated and displayed on the page for that node. This might not actually require an extension at all - it might all be doable using a combination of Semantic MediaWiki and the External Data extension. External Data lets you get structured data from an API - so the key is just to make sure that there are APIs to get all the relevant information out of Bugzilla, Gerrit, the Wikimedia blog, etc. If there aren't APIs right now to handle all of that, that might require some programming - but I think that would be an easier and more flexible solution than creating a whole extension just for this purpose. More flexible in the sense that all formatting of values would be done within wiki pages - so modifying the look of any of it, or, say, the number of rows displayed for each data type, could be done within the wiki, as opposed to requiring changes to the PHP code.

Interesting! The only reason to suggest an extension was not to mess with the rest of the system. If Nodes can be created just by configuring properly the system, then all the better.

We could start iterating on Nodes without External Data, simply with data available in the own wiki. For instance, the first Node features proposed here requires that

• Category pages aggregate automatically related events and users.
• The content area is as editable as a regular category page.

For example: "Node:Lua" starts with the plain editable textarea, followed by a list of users (only names linked to profiles) following the Lua category, and Lua events in the right column.

Once this piece is working we would consider more entities from within the wiki: projects and tasks.

When we reach this stage we can consider external data: Wikimedia Blog entries, Bugzilla and Gerrit. But I wouldn't put too much thought on these at this point.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.