Archive for the 'MDC' Category

It suddenly occurred to me I’ve not shared information about the status of the Mozilla Developer Center in a while, so I thought I’d go ahead and write that up since the World of WarCraft servers are currently all screwed up.

There are currently two significant issues in work:

1. There is a minor but annoying security glitch that is in the process of being addressed.  In theory it is now fixed, but testing is underway to be sure of it.
2. The “what’s changed” RSS feeds are broken.  We installed a fix this evening but it doesn’t appear to have resolved the problem — instead, the symptoms just changed.  I’ve sent new email to MindTouch to get further information on what’s going on here.  This is of course a serious problem for us, so I’m pushing hard to get it fixed as soon as possible.

There are of course other things going on, but most of those items are going to come in the Lyons release of MindTouch Deki, which I’ve talked about before.

Most of my time right now is being spent on documentation for Firefox 3.1.  I’ll blog more about the progress on that soon.

I just finished a nice chat on the phone with an engineer at MindTouch, and things look really good for the updated RSS feed/change tracking/diffing side of things in Deki.

In addition to the things I’ve already mentioned (needing a more side-by-side like comparison of versions, showing only the changed sections, and adding a link to the version history to the feed), we talked about:

• Adding a way to know what changed in cases that currently get listed as “No wording changes.”  This includes style changes and changes to HREFs.
• Adding links to edit the article and see its revision history to RSS feed entries.
• Adding a “ban user” link to the revision history page.
• An option to not “digest” the RSS feed entries for page changes.  Right now, if five people have changed an article since the last time I looked, I see one entry lumping all the changes together.  This will let me see each change separately instead.

We also discussed the current problem where the audio and video tags get escaped by the source editor.  They’re going to fix that for us as well.

I’m in the process of scheduling a meeting with our friends at MindTouch to talk about revisions they might make to the diff and history system in Deki to better suit our needs.  Feel free to dump your thoughts here; I’ll go through them and use your suggestions to help build a list of proposals to make when I talk to them.

Right now, the big things are:

• We need side-by-side diffs instead of inline diffs, both for legibility and to make translation via copy-and-paste easier.
• Instead of showing the entire article when comparing, it would be better to only see the changed areas.
• The recent changes page/RSS feed need links to the diffs.

What do you want to see in article diffs and revision histories?

I’d like to add links to ban users right into the revision history.  Saves me time.

We upgraded to MindTouch Deki 8.08.1 late last week, which introduced a few bug fixes and closed a couple of minor security holes.

A new update, 8.08.1a, is coming hopefully tonight to fix a regression that caused our recent changes RSS feeds to break.  Sorry about that!

I’m continuing to work with our friends at MindTouch to ensure that Deki continues to evolve in a direction that will make us all very happy.  I look forward to seeing the next release, which promises to be a hum-dinger.

MindTouch has posted their initial plans for the upcoming “Lyons” release, which will be the next major update that we’ll receive from them, early next year.  This version promises to address the vast majority of the issues we still have with Deki, including most of those on my “most important issues” list.

They’re also working on a very interesting notifications API, which will make it possible to do things like automatically tweet or send email when pages are changed; this will let us set up subject-matter experts to receive notifications whenever pages in their area of expertise are changed.  This will help encourage more active technical reviews of articles, and I think will lead to higher-quality documentation.

There’s also a lot of work being done to make it even easier to customize the software without requiring patches to the code itself.

Check out the roadmap to get some insight into what you can look forward to seeing on MDC in the coming months.

It turns out that MindTouch Deki already has RSS feeds for each language, there’s just no UI exposed to get at them.  I’ve added links to these feeds to the Localizing MDC page.  This should be a big help for all our localizers!  MindTouch will be adding UI for getting at these feeds in their next release, Lyons, coming later this year.

I continue to work with MindTouch to ensure that as many of our needs are addressed as possible as soon as possible.  Despite the bumpiness of our transition, I’m mostly pleased with it, and am quite sure everyone will be very happy once we get through the next release of Deki, which is going to address the vast majority of our most common issues.