On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Daniel Barrett <d...@vistaprint.com> wrote:
> >Why is there a reliance on manually editing LocalSettings.php and
> uploading it to the site?
> >Why is there not an Admin page that edits this online?
>
> "Config file vs. GUI admin page" is a religious issue for systems in
> general. If you're running one just one wiki, say, as a hobby, then a GUI
> would probably be simpler. As the sysadmin of 15+ MediaWiki sites (config
> file) and 10+ WordPress sites (GUI that saves to a database) at a company,
> however, I have found MediaWiki's config files much easier to maintain than
> WordPress's settings GUI & database, to keep the settings of all our sites
> in sync. (With a GUI you often want a database, not a config file, to
> support concurrent edits by multiple admins.)
>
> Config files have these advantages:
>
> 1. Config changes can easily be tracked, rolled back, diffed, etc., using
> any off-the-shelf version control system. (Even if your GUI can generate a
> config file to be version controlled, you don't know that its final form
> will exactly reflect the change you made: the "save" function might reorder
> lines, reformat the text, add unwanted commands that set default values,
> etc. This screws up diffs.)
>
> 2. "Undo" is easy, no matter how long ago you made the change. When I
> change settings in the WordPress GUI and click "OK" or "Save", I sometimes
> have to work hard to roll back those changes or even remember what they
> were.
>
> 3. You can put anything you want into the MediaWiki config file (arbitrary
> PHP code) instead of whatever limited functionality that the GUI designers
> believed would be useful. This is invaluable. Possibly you could factor out
> the simpler settings into a GUI tool.
>
> 4. Config files are easily deployed to multiple targets as part of a
> formal release process: e.g., rsync to your 10+ wikis. With WordPress, I
> pull my hair out every time an admin makes a change through the GUI on one
> site and doesn't document it. It can be hard to identify that change so it
> can be documented, version-controlled, and deployed to other sites.
>
> 5. With config files, you can use your favorite editor (emacs, vi, etc.)
> instead of whatever the GUI designer gives you, which means I can work
> faster with fewer errors using familiar tools.
>
> The main advantage of a GUI, if it's designed VERY well, is simplicity,
> making administration accessible to less technical people. That's not an
> issue for my team (we're all technical). But I can imagine that a GUI for
> changing basic MediaWiki settings would be useful for some admins.
>
> DanB
>
Ironic, but a wiki page itself has most of those advantages.
--Fred
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