Plentywiki: feature updates / report problems

[Mervi]

Aaaand just as fast I'll have to take that extension down. It's seriously messing with my #AddWorkingTemplates2017 project.

I hope to bring it back later.

[Mervi]

We recently moved to a new host, and I was able to do a slight restart with the wiki installation. The double slashes in the urls are gone! I was able to "refreshen" the installation, and now I'm actually able to update it again.  We've finally left the .25 series behind, the wiki is currently running on .27 which, while not the latest and shiniest thing, is at least a stable release with ongoing security updates.

I haven't yet been able to test anything, but if you run into problems, please let me know! I'll be installing some new plugins fairly soon which will mean some nifty new features!

[Mervi]

A few things that have happened ~behind the scenes~ since the move and upgrade of the wiki software

- I left the join form intentionally open "overnight" for 10 hrs --> 40 spam accounts signed up and started messing around 
-> after cleaning up, I regretfully put the account approval process in place again
(regretfully because it means jumping through some hoops for anyone who wants to edit the wiki and doesn't already have an account)
-> I've updated and polished the request account system, so it hopefully now has more user friendly instructions. You can try it out!

I've installed the mobile frontend plugin which is basically the same thing you see when you visit wikipedia on mobile (the site, not the app!) Some notes:
* You can always switch back to the desktop view if you hate it, there's a link at the bottom of each page
* the current wiki home page is NOT ideal for mobile and has to be re-designed at some point anyway, but for now mobile theme users get a "lite" version of it
* the mobile theme has made me realise that early on we relied on categories to provide info A LOT, and as those don't show up in mobile, tiny articles contain 80% less info on mobile than they do on desktop
* you'll see thumbnails on mobile but not the whole image. Not sure yet whether this is a mobile issue or something to do with the multimediaviewer plugin (see below) but I'm aware of it and it's on the list of things to fix!

* new plugin "graph". This seems to be the ~future~ instead of the old easytimeline which has been requested & considered before. Also it was super easy to install, unlike the old one. Haven't had time to play around with it yet, but it can do so much more than just timeline graphs. Feel free to have a go! Instructions here.

* new plugin "multimediaviewer" ... I'm still a bit uncertain whether this one will stay. It displays images (and other media if we had it ) on a black background and you can browse through galleries etc. Basically like you do on wikipedia these days. Right now it appears half broken to me because it doesn't gather the info from the templates etc - I'd need to look into how to build those the wikipedia way to make the plugin work correctly besides just displaying the images nicely. YOU CAN DISABLE this feature for yourself - just click on any of the images, wait till it opens on the black background and look for a gear symbol and click on disable.

* new plugin WikiSEO. I've been testing this one only for a couple of days now. Basically it should make our pages easier for google et co to understand because they see text that is customised for them first (that is not displayed to the user) instead of code that calls up images etc (which happens in most book articles here for example). If you need more info on this, ask away!

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Also, there's a known issue with the wiki that is related to the version we're currently using where things that you put in a category (whether it's images or articles) don't seem to appear in that category despite the category links being displayed correctly on the bottom of the page. Don't worry if you see this happening, the images/pages ARE in fact in that category, the system is just running behind in recognising that! There's going to be a fix for this eventually (at least when we some day move to the next v. of the script...) but in the mean time I'm doing semi-regular maintenance "forcing" the thing to update itself.  
 

And lastly, as with all the other parts of theplenty.net , PlentyWiki is now behind a secure connection, so if you have links or bookmarks, please update them to httpS://theplenty.net/wiki/
There's a redirect in place of course but it doesn't hurt to use the secure connection all the way. 

[Mervi]

I'm going to keep logging changes here because I've found it really helpful for myself to be able to come back and check where I've made changes!

I've been working on the dreaded legal stuff a bit. Last year, I started to categorise images and add licensing information to them, but there are still quite a few where I haven't been able to find enough information to correctly attribute them to anyone. In the last few days I've added more license options, namely the Creative Commons licenses which would mostly be used by anyone wanting to upload their own art to the wiki. I've also been trying to make the text in the licenses and in the footer of the wiki etc a bit more precise.