Rolling over to new MediaWiki

[Dave Neary]

Hi Karsten,

On 09/27/2012 12:09 AM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> Garrett's new MediaWiki skin is getting close to completion, and it
> happens to run on MediaWiki 1.19, which we need to upgrade to.
>
> We have a few approaches:
>
> 1. Staggered upgrade - update MediaWiki 1.19 (either with an RPM or
> ZIP), test, then update the theme. Do move to OpenShift as another process.
>
> 2. One rollover - create the new site with the new version and the new
> theme on OpenShift, import the data (pages and users), test; then freeze
> the old wiki, do a final import of pages and users, and roll over DNS to
> the OpenShift instance.
>
> Advantages? Disadvantages? Different approaches?

It seems to me that we can cut things up into different bits, each of 
which is independent. We can do some of the things independent of 
getting the new site ready to go:

1. Upgrade MediaWiki to 1.19.2 - this should be a noop for site visitors 
and users

2. Preparing the content of the site for the migration - we're replacing 
~15 pages managed by Wordpress by ~6 or 7 wiki pages - we need to make 
sure all the links work, point at existing pages when it's appropriate, 
and we need to do the copy writing for Develop, Documentation and maybe 
review the contetn of Community (which is a bit wordy for my taste right 
now).

3. Install extensions which we need for the new site - we need to 
evaluate first. I'd like to have an RSS extension, perhaps a Calendar 
extension, and one for embedding videos from YouTube

4. Updating the content with some of the new content we have - videos 
and screenshots a-go-go, the updated installation guides that Jason has 
created, gathering links of blog entries from RobertM and jbrooks (among 
others) on topics like integrating Gluster storage, etc.

5. Installing the new theme

6. Moving to new hosting - either OpenShift or alternate hosting when we 
have it.


I think we can do the MediaWiki upgrade and extension selection now and 
completely dissociate those from the new website deployment.
We definitely need to get to "feature parity" with the old site ASAP, 
and I think we need to integrate some newer content too pre-launch.

The new hosting, I think, can come afterwards. Are we ready to move to 
OpenShift right now?

> Garrett - we have our install at /wiki, which is a bit standard, and
> there are reasons AIUI:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_in_site_root_directory
>
> Note the admonition that doing the wiki at root-level means no support
> from Wikimedia developers.
>
> The idea to make the MediaWiki instance the entire site means we need to
> decide how we want www.ovirt.org to resolve, same with wiki.ovirt.org,
> and do we hack MediaWiki to make it work with / instead of /wiki.

which do you prefer - redirecting to /wiki, or using modrewrite to spoof it?

> - Karsten, who wrote all this when about to check on the situation with
> MediaWiki 1.19 in Fedora/EPEL, and realized we could skip the problem by
> using OpenShift directly and immediately.

What is your position, in general, on using upstream releases from 
.tar.gz? Do you think we should require an RPM?

There's a little issue upgrading 1.16 to 1.19 you should be aware of - 
$IP isn't set in the local config file any more, it's calculated at 
runtime - and it didn't quite work with the way Fedora packaged the RPM 
previously (to simplify, MediaWiki expects to find the whole application 
in one directory hierarchy).

Anyway, I favour doing it step by step if we can.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13