User:01tonythomas/Wikimania 2016

So, this was like my 4th travel with the Wikimedia Foundation, and one I call most productive and entertaining. I feel sad for not writing down things from my other travels, including Mediawiki Developers summit 2015, Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 and 2016. I was awarded the scholarship last year too by the foundation to attend Wikimania, but it did crashed with my academics, so had to give it back. I am going to write down only Technical stuff here, as we are in Mediawiki.org.

Preparation

This is something important, as I went with my new Logitech MK220, ready for the hackathon. This is something I always found missing in my previous visits and people over there were quick with their laptop, while I being a keyboard addict, stayed missing my keys. This helped readily in the hackathon this time, and I got a full table to lay my keyboard and mouse and yay!

I had couple of things in mind:

1. To get Newsletter extension we were working on beta - had some logging stuff left, should complete it
2. To get some features added to the Bouncehandler extension. My mentor Jeff Green and Legoktm were there, so I was optimistic about this one.

How it went

First day evening, I was bugging Legoktm on a complicated SQL query to get the logging done for the Newsletter extension description changes. We were handling these fields separately as any form in a special page would handle it, and logging, taking care of deletion and moving was a huge headache. We had to write a lot of code to get these done, and Legoktm was just furious on this one. He told me to use a ContentHandler and gave me his MassMessage extension as an example

Shifting Newsletter to use ContentHandler

By the end of Day 4. we had the change up in Gerrit and I need to thank Hoo, Legoktm and Quim Gil for their inputs. This new thing is awesome, and I am just happy at what all new features it just gave us. The newsletters are now moved to a Newsletter namespace, and we can now track history, changes, modifications, deletion, restoration and anything just in minimal lines of code and db queries. I hope the patch get merged soon, and we were in the Hackathon Showcase too, which happened on the evening of 26th June.

Phab ticket tracking improvement: T138462

Improvements in BounceHandler

So this is something I was always planning to do after repeated complaints from wiki users complaining they never got an email someone sent etc. Jeff Green and I discussed on the same extensively and found a plan by which we can use the current API with modifications to track both the sender and recipient of a bounced email and notifying both. This is only relevent to mails sent via Special:EmailUser, and the finding are documented in our phab ticket.

Conclusion

The trip went pretty nice, got loads of selfies with mentors and people around. Met WikiToLearn team, and I never got a selfie with Jimmy Wales. Thanks again for the Foundation for inviting me there! Esino Lario, We miss you!