Wikitravel:7 February 2005

From Wikitravel

[edit] Downtime 9 February 2005 01:00 UTC

I've been doing some technical work on the MediaWiki software, and I'd like to start rolling it out. To make this rollout process easier, however, I need to combine our 5 wiki codebases into a single one. There shouldn't be much of a user-visible change out of this, except different URLs for the CSS and Javascript files (we'll be using the same ones for all languages).

To make this combination, I'll be taking the server offline at 01:00 UTC on 9 Feb 2005. That's 8PM EST on the 8th ("tomorrow night" for me). I anticipate a maximum of one hour downtime, and I'll roll back if it goes longer than that.

Go-betweens, please pass this information along to the other language versions. --Evan 10:20, 7 Feb 2005 (EST)

[edit] Downtime 10 February 2005 01:00 UTC

MediaWiki has been updated to the 1.3.10 level to deal with some security bugs. The security issues have to do with user-edited CSS and Javascript, which is disabled on Wikitravel. However, since it's always a good idea to track the latest software, I'll be upgrading to that version on 10 Feb at 01:00 UTC (8PM EST for me), and it should take about an hour. --Evan 10:37, 7 Feb 2005 (EST)

I normally don't like to make multiple changes in a single downtime, but I've decided to abuse this downtime to do one more thing. Our articles are currently found at http://wikitravel.org/[language code]/[word for article in language]/[title]. Having the word for "article" in there is kind of a drag -- it makes the URLs longer, and programming a conversion from (language, title) -> URL a lot harder.

So, I'm going to change the site layout such that an article in French on France will be at http://wikitravel.org/fr/France and the German help page will be at http://wikitravel.org/de/Wikitravel:Hilfe. The old URLs will be redirected to the new version with redirects; that is, http://wikitravel.org/fr/article/France and http://wikitravel.org/de/artikel/Wikitravel:Hilfe will bounce to the new version.

To make this work right, I'm going to need to move images out of the /[language code]/ dirs. So images and other uploads will now be at /uploads/[language code]/, and (again) redirects will point from the old location to the new one.

Finally, because there are already a few files in /[language code]/, and we don't want them stomped on by the caching software, I'm going to imperiously forbid 7 article names: "LocalSettings.php", "index.php", "redirect.php", "LocalSettings", "index", "redirect", and ".htaccess". Note that namespaced versions are A-OK; [[Wikitravel:LocalSettings]] will be allowed. I don't think this is as unwieldy for travel guides as it is for other reference works.

The whole subject was brought up to me by users on Wikipedia; see WikiPedia:User talk:Patrick#wikitravel: for details. Hopefully this will improve our amount of links from Wikipedia, bringing in more contributors. At the very least, it should cut a few hundred bytes off every page request.

Any suggestions or comments before tonight's upgrade are very welcome. --Evan 08:47, 9 Feb 2005 (EST)