Tuesday, July 13, 2010

openSUSE: new wiki, and now ...

... a lot of work and some trouble. Since yesterday is the new openSUSE wiki online, as I discovered today as I checked my last week updated user page. The page was gone ... I had to create a new version of the page. Thanks!

I really appreciate the time the openSUSE wiki-team spend on the update, but unfortunately the new wiki don't always work as exprected:
  • You can export any page via Special:Export (from the old wiki, which you can reach via http://old-en.opensuse.org) and you should be able to import the page via Special:Import. But the import page don't work, you get "Permission error: The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators.". No way to migrate a page from the old to the new wiki for now!
  • If you 'Log out', you end in a old-style wiki page, which is oddly enough part of the new wiki:
  • The User:* pages are still not protected. Any user can change the content of your userpage. That's inacceptable! If you don't monitor your page very closely other ppl. may write there whatever they want. Btw. I opened a bug ages ago (2008-07-16) for this problem, but it's still not fixed even though there is already a proposal how to fix it included (bnc#409520).
  • Due to this post you should recreate to User:* page with a template. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to load/import the template if you already created and saved the content of your page. That's why my page will stay in the old style.
So far so good about the technical part. There is another issue I don't like on the new wiki: the corporate design (CD). Except for the little lizard at the top left corner, there is not that much that differs the openSUSE wiki from other MediaWikis. I miss the distinguishing characteristics to other wikis and the associations to e.g. the design of the current openSUSE installer as you can see if you compare both side-by-side:


Even the sponsor logo is much bigger than the openSUSE lizard. There is no big recognition effect. While it's may not such an issue if you use a prosaic design for a developer service like build.opensuse.org, it's IMO important to have a design with a higher recognition effect for direct user services.
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