Archive for the 'Mozilla' Category

Here are some notes from a meeting I had with representatives from IT and Webdev at the Mozilla Summit. This will give everyone a bit of insight into the plans for the rollout process.

Before the transition starts, MindTouch is going to do another conversion of the slightly out of date MDC dump they currently have. This will let us test revisions to their converter to handle tag importing better. This in theory will happen in the next couple of days. I’m trying to pin MindTouch down on how long the work on the tag importing will take.

Once we have that conversion, it will be installed so we can test to be sure it works.

Once that’s done, Webdev will be doing some testing, mostly to make sure there aren’t any security issues they can find. They estimate this will take approximately one day to complete. While that goes on, IT will be working on the following:

• Load testing. They will make sure the new site can at least match the performance of the current MDC site. We’ve done this testing before satisfactorily but there have been changes since then, so we’re going to do it again. As long as the new site can handle at least 7-8 requests per second, we’re good to go. I believe it can handle many, many more than that.
• The site will be run off at least two machines. We currently have one. IT will need to get another one (either from its vast cache of unallocated hardware, or by picking one up somewhere — I don’t want to ask too many questions).
• Set up the new hardware, install MindTouch Deki onto it as well as our skin, and so forth.

Once IT is ready and Webdev has signed off, the launch process can begin. This will likely start around August 10th or 11th, since it will take a few days to complete:

1. IT will make the current MDC site read-only. This is necessary because we don’t want changes to be made that will be lost during the transition. For a few days, no edits to the documentation will be possible. This can’t be helped.
2. IT will then dump the MDC database and send that as well as a tarball of all the attachments to MindTouch. MindTouch will convert this content into Deki format for us. Note: MindTouch is under non-disclosure; user names, addresses, and so forth are protected material and will be kept confidential. The conversion process takes a couple of days because our database is so large.
3. Once MindTouch sends back the converted content, IT will install it.
4. IT will make the new server available for testing purposes.
5. I will confirm that the wiki is configured correctly; this includes installing our custom toolbar, adjusting various settings, and so forth.
6. I will then rebuild the site index; this is necessary after the import from MediaWiki.
7. I will also apply a few corrections to various templates that need hand-tweaking after the import. This will not necessarily cover all cases where things need hand-revising, but I’ll get the ones that I know of.
8. Then we will do some basic sanity checks. Make sure nothing is obviously broken, etc. We’ll invite people to test the site during the time leading up to the official launch on August 14th.
9. On August 14th, during the nightly maintenance cycle, the new MDC will launch, and developer.mozilla.org will take you to the new site.

The current MDC will be kept around for a while, just in case something goes catastrophically wrong with the transition and we’re forced to revert to it. This is highly unlikely, as we’ve tested the heck out of the new setup, but it can’t hurt to be cautious.

The editor toolbar on the MindTouch Deki-based MDC test server has been adjusted a bit. The font menu now includes the fonts the skin actually uses for article content, instead of the default fonts. In addition, the Styles popup menu now includes styles for things we actually use, including code, variables, and notes and warnings. This should be helpful.

If anyone has suggestions for further improvements to the toolbar in the new MDC, please let me know, and I’ll work on them!

Positive progress continues! This morning I finally got it through my head how to customize the styles menu in the editor; I’d been trying to do it the hard way, which doesn’t actually work. So I’m working on coming up with a custom style list that will help our writers use styling consistently.

Some of those styles will use the same markup, but by labeling them differently (function name, class name, etc), it will help people pick the correct style without having to think. I know I don’t like it when I’m forced to think, so I figured I’d help others that have the same problem.

Our planned August 14th launch date looks pretty solid at this point, assuming the scant handful of outstanding issues of consequence get resolved.

Right now, the outstanding to-dos are:

• Implement the custom styles menu (in progress).
• MindTouch is working on fixes to the MediaWiki importer for better importing categories as tags; in particular, tags for external links don’t work yet. Since this import will only be done prior to launch, we need this just right.
• One more test conversion of the MediaWiki site to test that change.

After that, we can start the work on the transition proper. I’ll post more details about that soon. My notes are on my laptop, which hasn’t yet been unpacked since my trip to Whistler for the summit.

Speaking of the Summit, despite all the joking about the horror of it all, it was actually an excellent event. Dan Portillo did a fabulous job planning it, and really rolled with the punches as they came. Everything went remarkably smoothly despite the unexpected and, really, totally unpredictable, issues. Way to go!

When Sophie (my 3-year-old) was told that I was away at a meeting all this past week, she had this to say to my wife:

“Maybe I can go outside and I can find my car and then I can drive the wheel and you can sit in front of me and I can find Daddy at the meeting and bring her home.”

Other than her ongoing problem with gender and pronouns, this is pretty much the sweetest thing I ever heard.

I just finished meeting with Jeremy Orem and Mike Morgan and we have a plan that will result in launching the new MDC on Thursday, August 14th.

This should give MindTouch time to fix and test the tag import problem, as well as for IT and webdev to finish tests.

I’m very excited that we’re getting so close!

So the rockslide has thrown a wrench into the works here. Dan Portillo is totally on it, and the buses toward Vancouver have already been rescheduled.

The down side is that instead of leaving the hotel at 7 AM Friday, now I’m leaving at 11 PM Thursday. Oof.

There’s a bug in Bugzilla for this.

Friday will be an extraordinarily long day.

Still, this summit has been very interesting and I’m getting a lot done here. That aside, though, I do look forward to seeing my daughter again.

I’m sitting in on the Thunderbird UX session at @moz08 right now, and I’m quite pleased by what they’re showing here. Sounds like the user experience is going to be vastly improved.

I’ve also noticed that my biggest gripe — that selecting text and choosing “Reply” still quoted the entire message instead of just the selection — appears to be fixed. Yay!

With a little help from the kind folks at MindTouch and our rockin’ dudes in IT, we got a couple of glitches fixed in our MindTouch Deki configuration. The correct editor is now being used, so it looks rather nicer than it did before.

In addition, we’ve enabled extension support while editing, which means, for example, you can select a code sample, then choose a transformation such as “syntax.javascript”, which will apply JavaScript syntax highlighting to a code sample.

That will be a huge win for us, especially since it adds line numbers which will make it easier to reference code lines from within the body of an article’s text.

Check out our test server and see what you think!

In related news, I’ve just finished doing my presentation covering the rationale behind our transition from MediaWiki to Deki, as well as a demo of the wiki and a discussion of features our users would like to have. I’ll share that information in this space as soon as I turn my notes into something legible.

I’m sitting here at gate A30 in Atlanta’s airport, waiting for my flight to Vancouver. It’s already been a long day (or so it seems). I was on a trip last week, from which I got home at around 8 PM last night. Then I was up at 3:15 this morning to catch my flight out from Knoxville.

Ouch.

I expect to cower sleepily in my room mostly this afternoon, to try to get a nap in before the reception tonight.

I’m looking forward to the presentations. I just wish we’d been able to get the new MDC launched before my session demonstrating it. However, we at least have the test server up, so we’ll just use that.

Note to self: when finished upgrading WordPress, check to be sure you re-enable the spam filters. Oops.