Wikifunctions:Status updates/2024-08-29
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Limits on Name and Description Lengths
We recently introduced more stringent limits on the length of object names, input names, and descriptions. This is mostly due to design constraints on several of the places where we plan to use these names and descriptions, and also due to size constraints for objects in MediaWiki.
These limits are not yet being strictly enforced, and there are ways to circumvent them. This is to support the transition from the time before these limits were in place: we want to avoid the situation that typos cannot be fixed because a name is too long.
We are asking the Wikifunctions community to help us shorten names and descriptions that are too long. In the next week or so, we will provide a list of objects and the languages that go beyond the new restrictions.
If there are concerns about the restrictions, please raise these on the project chat, or in the other usual channels.
Recent changes in the software
Our big change this week is a new way for the "About widget" to work, as previously discussed at Wikifunctions:Design/About widget improvements (T369617). Instead of a dialog, you now interact with it in-line where it appears, with each language you select appearing in an accordion view and prompting you with the fallback languages' values, if available. This should make it easier to quickly add multiple languages when editing, and simpler for readers to find labels that they can read. Our thanks to community members who helped us co-design this on-wiki and elsewhere, especially GrounderUK for their detailed feedback.
As part of our work this Quarter towards embedding Wikifunctions calls in wikitext, we re-wrote some of the code, partially preparing it for cross-wiki calls. Expect more to see in this area soon.
We added a visual message, "Running…", to the display when waiting for an Object to get rendered, rather than the page appearing blank (T366722). We also updated the alignment of the ">" icon display next to Objects, which had been broken by wider MediaWiki ecosystem updates (T366723).
We fixed a bug that meant pressing "back" at some stages would sometimes, but not always, clear the form when creating new Functions (T369713).
We prepared for dropping the backwards-compatibility of strings rather than references to refer to programming languages (Z61s) in code blocks, running the migration on the Beta Cluster that we had run in production in May, and making some related improvements (T287153).
We re-built the fundamental "ZObjectKeyValue" UX component, which is the fall-back display of a key and its value, to make the code simpler and more robust, and allow for more comprehensive adjustments to it in future. We dropped the local Chip and ChipContainer components, now unused in favour of the Codex ones built after ours (T334738).
We dropped our old metrics data collection system, now that we've confirmed the new metrics system is equivalent (T369946). Our thanks to Formafix, who wrote several patches improving our PHP code with better dependency injection, and Bartosz Dziewoński, who found and fixed a bug with our relative path dependencies in our UX code as part of wider MediaWiki fixes (T373065).
We, along with all Wikimedia-deployed code, are now using the latest version of the Codex UX library, v1.11.1, as of this week. It should have no user-visible changes on Wikifunctions, so please comment on the Project chat or file a Phabricator task if you spot an issue. We adjusted some of our browser tests to match this (T372415).
Function of the Week
No Function of the Week this week, sorry. We'll return with it next week!