Topic on Extension talk:BlogPage/Flow

mediawiki 1.34 commenting

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AlgorithmGG (talkcontribs)

HI,


it seems as though commenting is broken on the blog posts. nothing is happening when user clicks the button to post the comment.

Jack Phoenix (talkcontribs)

The commenting functionality is provided by Extension:Comments. Regardless, the social tools are currently undergoing pretty major architectural changes to support the new actor table and the general concept of actors. See phab:T227345 for more technical details.

The issue you're describing sounds like a JavaScript error of some kind. I haven't seen any such JS errors in my devboxes. Is your wiki public so I could take a look at it?

Regardless, I suggest checking back by, say, the end of January or so; I hope the actor migration stuff has been mostly done by that point. (But if you'll look at the mentioned Phabricator ticket, you'll see that Comments and SocialProfile are some of the trickiest extensions to port over. Regardless, using actor IDs instead of traditional user ID/user name combos provides benefits like eventually being able to support user renaming on ShoutWiki, hence why that is being done now.) At that point all the social tools should support actors and work on MediaWiki 1.34 as expected.

AlgorithmGG (talkcontribs)
AlgorithmGG (talkcontribs)

Excuse my wiki its a mess at the moment as I am trying to figure out how to add a top ten language circle.

Jack Phoenix (talkcontribs)

No worries. So, looking at https://g1pedia.com/index.php/Special:Version, seems that you have the MobileFrontend extension (and its companion, the MinervaNeue skin) installed; it's a popular solution for providing a mobile experience of sorts, and was developed and is also maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. While both the MobileFrontend extension and the MinervaNeue skin are thus quite stable, they do some things which at least I consider odd. Namely that extensions' CSS and JS ResourceLoader modules aren't loaded unless they are explicitly marked as "OK for mobile", i.e. the module definition has a targets array which specifies mobile (and optionally also desktop) as a valid target. Comments' both RL modules do specify both targets (in the extension.json file), so I'm not sure what's going on there.

BlogPage's RL modules don't specify targets, which probably in practise means with that the MobileFrontend view (which you can activate by appending ?mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile to the page URL) BlogPage's special pages look funky and don't quite work right as the CSS and JS isn't loaded. Commenting shouldn't be affected as BlogPage literally uses Comments for that instead of doing anything related to commenting on its own.

That being said, I can safely say that I've really not tested the MobileFrontend+MinervaNeue+social tools combo, so in that respect, all bets are off. Furthermore as none of the social tools are used on Wikimedia Foundation wikis, it means that WMF developers most likely haven't tested the combination either.

Seeing that you have the awesome, responsive, actively developed Timeless skin already installed, I'd consider whether you have a pressing need for MobileFrontend and MinervaNeue and the features they provide. If you choose to uninstall those two and set Timeless as the default skin, it should provide a similar-ish mobile experience without the usual MobileFrontend-specific content transformations and the like.

You can also try contacting the maintainers of MobileFrontend and MinervaNeue, Wikimedia Foundation's Reading Web team and specifically Jon Robson, to see what they have to say about this.

To clarify my stance on this: this certainly sounds like a software bug of sorts and something that'd be nice to get fixed. But I can't promise an ETA of any kind on a fix, as I don't quite fully understand what's going on here (code-wise) nor do I have time to work on this right now; the aforementioned actor migration stuff is honestly a nightmare and a time-consuming one, so I fully expect that to keep me busy at least for the next couple weeks or so.

AlgorithmGG (talkcontribs)

Many thanks for your reply. Do we know what framework is used to make it mobile friendly for example (bootstrap)? its not bootstrap but it would be handy to know what language the button is written in as to why its not translated and functioning on mobile view. I am not sure if you have seen how its working but other than the post buttons not being translated. It is ready to work and looks awesome.

Jdlrobson (talkcontribs)

Use MobileFrontend if you want to serve different experiences to mobile and desktop users and optimise the experience.

Using MobileFrontend you'll have a more performant, controllable and in some cases more usable mobile experience.

The downside is many extensions are not compatible with MobileFrontend. The targets system was written intentionally to avoid the running of code that hadn't been integrated with the extension. This avoids loading code that's not needed in the given context or hasn't been tested in the existing device.

ResourceLoader/Writing a MobileFrontend friendly ResourceLoader module is pretty thorough on the why and the how extension owners can integrate with MobileFrontend.

In this case it's not a Wikimedia extension so you could probably turn on all the modules it uses with a mobile target but I cant promise the experience will be completely usable.

Note Minerva has nothing to do with this. It's just a skin like Monobook, Timeless and Vector.

AlgorithmGG (talkcontribs)

thanks I've noticed a few issues with social tools I.e sending messages board to board the send button is broken. It looked like a php html issue to me this function was only broken on the mobile app. Is it possible to add flow to the user board namespace at present? Exciting stuff!


Kind Regards

Jack Phoenix (talkcontribs)

There's no such support for integrating with Flow, alas. The closest related ticket on Phabricator is phab:T167312 which is about integrating SocialProfile avatars with Flow; feel free to submit a new task on Phabricator! (That being said, full disclaimer: I don't know how likely it'd be for such a ticket to get fixed at least in a reasonable timeframe. As per its own infopage here, Flow's been in maintenance mode since 2015 and I haven't looked at how complicated it would be to have user boards or other similar textareas use Flow. At least Comments is finally getting a preview feature; long overdue, but better late than never.)

AlgorithmGG (talkcontribs)

Do you know of any information, I can study you would recommend please. I have a long flight coming up soon this month. And I would like to get a thorough understanding of how the scripts and extensions are working together.



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