1.27 – ShoutWiki Blog

Code Duplication Reduction

This week, our team has continued to work towards the 1.27.0 upgrade while providing our users with quick and useful support.

We’ve identified a number of additional bugs this week that have to be fixed, and in some cases have started working towards a solution.

The main technical highlight of the week has been some initial ground work being laid on T98 – Write a ShoutWiki library. This project will allow our team to continue to maintain our custom tools and extensions, specifically made for our wiki farm setup by reducing code duplication in various simple but essential pieces of code. This in turn, makes it easier to update these tools to allow us to focus on adding additional features and providing great user support.

I am personally very happy with the place ShoutWiki has been in the last week. We’ve had some of the best staff-user engagement we’ve seen in a long time, while making some great progress on some of our technical projects.

There will be no update next week – the majority of the team will be taking some much due holiday, however we will be answering essential queries through our support ticketing system and keeping the ship afloat. We expect to see you again in two Sundays time!

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.