Project:Wiki/Development

This space is Article description::a landing page for development and maintenance of wiki 'features' added by the Gentoo wiki project. These include front page news items using the News template, wiki-wide templates such as Developer, Project, News, GenericCmd (including sub-templates RootCmd, Cmd),etc.) and forms such as Form:Developer and Form:Project.

Workflows
Each of the following subsections include wiki maintainer workflows. Following these workflows should help maintainers not miss any steps necessary to improve the existing 'infrastructure' facilitated by wiki admins for the Gentoo community.

Main page wiki news items
Workflow processes:


 * 1) Write up news item and place on the Main Page.
 * 2) * Generally the latest 3 news items are visible... Any more than 3 and the page columns start to look unbalanced.
 * 3) Move oldest news item to the top of Gentoo_Wiki:News for archiving.

Developer and project 'profiles'
Developer 'profiles' on the wiki consist of a wiki form combined with a developer template. The process workflow of modifying the existing template :


 * 1) Create new property relevant type (URL / Text / etc.).
 * 2) Modify Developer/sandbox to accept new parameter(s).
 * 3) * It is important to note that this test page will need to be edited via the Edit source link directly. The form edit will not work properly. This is expected.
 * 4) * Be sure to tag the data as a property for future queries.
 * 5) * Test via the Developer profile test page.
 * 6) * If it looks good, then proceed, if not, then continue development iteration.
 * 7) Once it works as expected, then modify the Developer to mirror the changes made in the Developer/sandbox template.
 * 8) Modify Form:Developer to accept new parameter(s), etc.
 * 9) * Test via the Developer profile test page.
 * 10) * Use this page to test changes made to Developer and Form:Developer.
 * 11) Publish a news announcement with improvement on the Main Page and consider sending a message to the wiki mailing list
 * 12) * If the change is big enough a news item could be written for www.g.o, however doing so has not been necessary in the past.

Special considerations
The goal of setting Properties in the Developer and Forms templates is for querying the pages for data. They enable the possibility for exporting data to export to www.g.o and potentially other *.g.o sites in the future.

TODO - add example of a query...

CSS, JavaScript, and wiki templates
When extending and/or improving wiki templates, try to use CSS for text formatting whenever possible. Some of our users run NoScript browser extension, which blocks JavaScript. Adding new JavaScript libraries also requires infrastructure access, therefore CSS styling is the preferred styling method.