User:Dereckson/Reviews/Nimbus

Extension to review: Nimbus, a tag cloud
Review result: Denied. The extension is not maintained, provides a very limited feature and uses Flash.
Reviewer and date: --Dereckson (talk) 15:27, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

The Nimbus extension is a port of a Wordpress extension to generate a tag cloud.

A first evaluation has been made 2013-01-15, following the it.wikivoyage's request.

Status

On MediaWiki

The extension isn't currently maintained by the original author.

Supported versions by the extension are 1.14-1.16, we're are 1.21.

A stewardship request from 2011 (code ported to 1.17) is still pending a reply.

On Wordpress

This is an adaptation of a Wordpress plugin, which isn't maintained either.

The author has added the following disclaimer on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/: "IMPORTANT NOTICE This plug is no longer actively being developed. I do not recommend you install and use it. If you are currently using this plugin, please consider disabling it. Running unmaintained plugins in WordPress can cause security- and other issues. More info at roytanck.com. Should anyone be interested in taking over development, please contact me."

On live wikis

The extension lists some wikis using it, but I can't find a tag cloud on any of them, including when the extension is in Special:Version.

A demonstration could be found at http://s23.org/wiki/Sandbox/Nimbus and on the wiki's homepage, but this is not embeded on the articles (the categories links are broken, they don't lead to current categories URL scheme, demonstrating the abandoned state of the extension).

Repository

The extension isn't currently tracked in a repository.

The files are scattered between files to fetch from WP-Nimbus and a code to copy/paste from the extension page.

Design review

The extension uses Flash and not CSS to render content, allegedly for fonts support
The heuristic isn't documented
The operations to support I18n seem tedious.

Code review

After the maintenance assessment and the design issues, it doesn't seem necessary to do a proper and comprehensive code review at this stage.

Let's simply note raw SQL queries should be replaced by database abstraction calls.

Recommendations

Evaluate the heuristic efficiency.
Contact User:Aiden, as he's interested to take over extension maintainership
Upgrade the extension to 1.19+ (1.19 being our current LTS release)
Render the tag output in CSS, not in Flash