Categories
Technical

MediaWiki 1.27.0 – Coming Soon!

The team’s activity last week was dominated by technical tasks. In particular, the main focus of the team was preparing for the MediaWiki 1.27.0 upgrade which will be happening soon.

While we’re not in a position to announce the date of the upgrade just yet, the technical team have been working continuously over the week to prepare it. A number of functions have been removed or replaced in this release which affects a larger chunk of our code than normal. In particular, skins and anti-spam tools which need to be updated before we can deploy 1.27.0 on all wikis.

We also pushed the last set of code to production from the 1.26 release which included a number of bugfixes for Aurora, JavaScript loading for a number of skins and i18n updates to point to our new bug tracking tool which we announced recently.

The customer support team continued their tireless work to respond to any queries and help as many users as possible, and our interns are continuing to make great progress on some interesting new project.

You can follow the progress of our upgrade work on Phabricator – Task 90.

Categories
Customer Support Features General

Phabricator: ShoutWiki’s new bug tracker

home

Today we’re announcing public access to our new bug tracking and project management system.

Phabricator is a powerful open source system initially developed by staff at Facebook. We originally moved to Phabricator in 2015 to take advantage of the set of repository hosting tools that are included within the software.

Our move was prompted by the Wikimedia Foundation’s adoption of the software who are also using Phabricator as their bug tracking and code hosting system.

As some users have noticed, our old bug tracking system, powered by Bugzilla has been down for a considerable amount of time. Bugzilla was written in a mix of Python and Perl, whereas Phabricator is written primarily in PHP, the same language as MediaWiki. Over time, Bugzilla has become increasingly hard to maintain with our current software stack, and when we migrated many of our backend tools to our new server in, we made the decision that it was time to migrate to Phabricator.

One of the key features we are excited about in the bug tracking software is the ability to assign multiple projects, whereas in Bugzilla a bug could only be filed under one component and product. A task may be filed under various projects where it affects different features.

Phabricator accounts are currently independent of ShoutWiki.com user accounts, and you can create an account using your email address and password or using a Google or GitHub account. We are currently attempting to implement the MediaWiki OAuth handler developed by the Wikimedia Foundation so you can link your ShoutWiki account with your Phabricator profile.

The Phabricator software is designed to be modular adding different modules for different aspects of functionality. Maniphest is the bug and task tracking module in Phabricator and has a simple interface for filing a bug. When submitting a task, you only have to submit a title and a description which can all be amended later. The projects box can be filled in if a particular feature is causing you issues and will auto-complete project names for you.

create-task

You can securely find Phabricator at https://phabricator.shoutwiki.com.

If you have any questions or issues with Phabricator, you can find us on the Freenode IRC network in #ShoutWiki, email support@shoutwiki.com or comment below.