Project:Technical • CODECS: Online Database and e-Resources for Celtic Studies

This page is intended to touch on some of the technical aspects of this website, especially with regard to selgā. For general information on how to edit pages, see Help:Editing.

Software

The website is powered by the MediaWiki software package. Some links for users of the software: User's guide • Configuration settings list • MediaWiki FAQ • MediaWiki release mailing list.

It uses a variety of ‘extensions’ (modules or plugins) to enhance its functionality as a content management system and collaborative environment, notably Semantic MediaWiki and related extensions, such as Semantic Forms.

See Special:Version for a list of software installed.

Current issues

Discussion and monitoring

See also Help:Communication >>

Due to a javascript conflict with the current skin (GumaxDD), the tab link for watching and unwatching pages does not respond when clicked on. To make it work, press right-click and open the link in a new window. For the use of watchlists, see Help:Communication (and Help:Page menus).
As of July 2013, discussion threading is enabled through the LiquidThreads extension. Searching threads using the standard entry box on top of each discussion page does not currently work. It relies on a Lucene backend, which is not installed on our server.
As of July 2013, recent changes can also be narrowed down by category.

Searching

Forthcoming

Semantic MediaWiki and related extensions

See also Help:SMW >>

Because of one or multiple bugs in SMW, property values may sometimes come in duplicates. The developers are aware of this erratic behaviour, but have not been able to tackle the issue.
Semantic Drilldown: filters may not work.
For some reason, probably a bug in SMW, HTML-encoded square brackets are interpreted as non-HTML-encoded square brackets when they turn up as values in a semantic query. This causes problems when the same values are queried again. In Template:Reference (diff), an adhoc fix has been implemented to substitute the unwanted non-HTML-encoded characters for HTML-encoded ones.
External Data would be useful for querying TEI/XML documents, but it does not seem ready for that stage yet. Notably, on some systems, there are problems with accented characters.
For issues related to Semantic Forms, please see [1].

Sorting

Pages are currently sorted, in categories and elsewhere, using the default alphabetical order of Unicode code points ([2]). This is not always helpful for accented characters, however, e.g. in the case of Irish. There is a setting available to alter the collation ($wgCategoryCollation), but we lack the shell access required to use it. Custom sort keys are currently applied to individual pages (through {{DEFAULTSORT:...}}), but this is only a half-way solution that is not always recognised by all components of the software.

Other

The page tabs 'talk' (or 'discussion'), 'edit', 'edit with form', 'view source' and 'history' are currently disabled for anonymous users. These tabs are used by editors, but are otherwise of little use to site visitors.