Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Fortnightly update – 29 September 2012

Hi,

This is the fortnightly update, detailing what we’ve done since the last fortnightly update, which was published on 15 September 2012 and what are our plans for the future.

Recent updates

Since our last fortnightly update, four bug tickets were closed.

Two wikis were imported to ShoutWiki:

Cook879 was promoted from intern to a full customer support staff member. Welcome!

What are we currently working on?

We’re planning on releasing a quarterly report, featuring statistics about the past quarter (Q3) on Sunday, 30 September 2012, which is the last day of the third quarter.

Past targets which are yet to be completed are on our roadmap, but in addition to those, we’re planning some cool new stuff, such as:

  • better support for mobile devices
  • the new skin mentioned in our last fornightly update
  • and naturally, some cool new wikis!

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding these features, as well as what we could do to make ShoutWiki even better! If you have a great idea for a feature, a suggestion or just general feedback, let us know — either in the comments section of this blog post or via the contact form.

BugZilla

Please report any and all software bugs you may come across to on our BugZilla to help us in getting them fixed and improving ShoutWiki!

—-
On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
– Solar Dragon
ShoutWiki Customer Support Team

Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Fortnightly update – 15 September 2012

Hi,

This is the fortnightly update, detailing what we’ve done since the last fortnightly update, which was published on 1 September 2012 and what are our plans for the future.

Recent updates

Our developers have mostly been working on backend things during this period. Namely, we’ve set up an analytics site that uses the great and free, open source Piwik analytics software.

Piwik shows detailed information about the visitors of a ShoutWiki-hosted wiki, such as the user’s (ISP’s) country, name of their Internet service provider (ISP), a graph of latest visits to the site, most popular browsers and their versions, popular search keywords, a list of websites referring users to the wiki and lots more!

Right now our Piwik instance is accessible by staff only, but we’re looking for ways to make the data available to wiki administrators in the future, as we feel it could be a valuable tool in promoting the wiki as well as generally improving the site.

A security vulnerability (SQL injection point) was identified in the Phalanx anti-spam extension by Chris Steipp of the Wikimedia Foundation. The issue was quickly fixed by Jack Phoenix and the fix was committed upstream.

We also fixed a CSS issue with diff pages on the Dark Monobook theme, as well as an issue with the CreateWiki founder talk page message always showing up in English, even if a translation was available.

What are we currently working on?

We’re trying to improve our internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) support to provide an even better ShoutWiki experience to our users who are not native or fluent speakers of the English language.
Some ShoutWiki extensions not previously translatable via translatewiki.net, such as Phalanx and SiteMetrics, can now be translated there.
Everything else that is not translatable via translatewiki.net can be translated via our Interface Messages Wiki. Please contact us to get translating privileges on the Interface Messages Wiki.

There has been some talk about designing and writing a custom skin for ShoutWiki. While no code has yet been written, this is certainly something we’re excited about. If and when such a skin would be written, it would most likely become the default skin of official ShoutWiki wikis, such as the English ShoutWiki Hub and its translations (for example, the Finnish ShoutWiki Hub, the French ShoutWiki Hub, etc.), but we want to emphasize this: it is not our intention to force a specific skin on ShoutWiki sites.
We, the ShoutWiki staff, believe in the freedom of opinion and the possibility to choose; the possibility to choose how you want your wiki to look like. That is precisely the reason why we’re offering a plethora of premium skins and we plan to add more premium skins in the future.

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding these features, as well as what we could do to make ShoutWiki even better! If you have a great idea for a feature, a suggestion or just general feedback, let us know — either in the comments section of this blog post or via the contact form.

BugZilla

We’ve upgraded our BugZilla to use the popular Vector skin as the default skin.
Please report any and all software bugs you may come across to on our BugZilla to help us in getting them fixed and improving ShoutWiki!

—-
On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
– Solar Dragon
ShoutWiki Customer Support Team