On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:35 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3 March 2010 10:19, Tei <oscar.vi...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I feel It takes a enormeous effort to move a proyect managed by >> programmers and sysadmins for programmers and sysadmins to be >> palatable by mere desktop users. The good news is that sysadmins and >> programmers are desktop users too, so will love a sexier interface, >> and more usability. > > > MediaWiki is server software and its audience is sysadmins. > > That said, for anyone with a reasonably recent Linux distro who is OK > with the command line, it's incredibly easy to install. (Even on > CentOS 4, if you put in some more recent packages of stuff.) >
Of course. This is who MediaWiki has been targeted at thus far: people with at least basic competency with a command line and configuration in text files. Does it work? Yes, and very well. But is it the most user friendly solution? Certainly not. Cleaning up the installation/upgrade is being targeted for the 1.17 release, if all goes well. Keep in mind that this will probably have less practical use for Wikimedia: this is being designed with third parties in mind. > I have no idea if there's a nice Windows package friendly enough for > the low-to-medium-tier NT admins (those who watch progress bars for a > living), but that would be nice. They're not going to get away from > the command line and text configuration files, though. > XAMPP. It takes a whopping 5 minutes to download and install. Gives you Apache/mySQL/PHP all ready to go at C:\xampp. It really cannot get any easier than this. If you can't install this, I wouldn't even trust you to run my WordPress. > (GUIfying LocalSettings.php is a bad, bad idea. There's enough bad > GUIs where someone just turned every possible text option into two > hundred radio-button options. A good GUI beats a command line ... a > command line beats a bad GUI.) > Some things could probably be moved out of LocalSettings. The Configure extension did some things right, some things wrong. I'd like to see our configuration management eventually handled in a standardized way (rather than just tacking on more $wgVars in GlobalSettings), which would open up the possibility for GUI-based configuration of some portions of MediaWiki > I would also dispute using WordPress as the gold standard example of > command-line-free administration ... I run WordPress happily on my own > blogs, and the one-click upgrade is very easy and slick, but I just > wouldn't be able to do what I want to do with it without considerable > command-line fiddling and PHP code hacking. WordPress lets you do > anything you want, much as MediaWiki does, but it similarly does not > restrain you from shooting yourself in the foot (as I have done > frequently). > > > - d. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l True. I think the ideal goal is keeping MediaWiki flexible enough where it suits the needs of Wikimedia (lest we never forget: they're the primary customer). Easy hacking makes it easy for them and easy for developers. Can we make the really common things (changing sitename, upload settings, path configuration, permissions, interwiki links) slightly less daunting though? Certainly. -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
