Essay:ProleWiki news logs/31 January 2024

We rolled out two much-requested features this month: the historical calendar and a new homepage (technically the language selection page).

Historical calendar

The historical calendar works fine, but I can foresee issues happening down the line if we ever want to improve it. Basically you have to create a subpage on the template page with the month and day, making a total of 366 subpages existing. It relies on a lot of manual input for formatting the daily events, and if we ever want to improve the calendar, we're probably going to run into issues and have to edit every one of the 366 subpages. The good thing is that we know exactly how many subpages this calendar will ever have (one for every day of the year counting Feb 29), and the bad news is that's still a lot of pages.

I tried to mitigate this issue by making each individual event a template which contains some parameters that we can use as both variables or metadata of sorts. The parameters are simply the year, month, day the event happened and of course a free description of the event. By simply editing the template itself, we can edit all events at once. However, we still need to edit the overarching format which looks like this:

1866
* Event template here

1929
* Event template here

And was set manually for every subpage of the calendar.

I suspect the history calendar will not need too much editing though. We can also try to edit the event template with DPL by the way, which is pretty in-depth and helps replace actual semantics.

New language selection page

For some reason, the original language selection page (which comes by default with MediaWiki from what I understand) was a PHP file but did not use any PHP. I was able to remake a new page which is normally 100% responsive (the search bar might have some display issues on some resolutions) with simple HTML and CSS.

We have to edit this page manually when we add new language instances, which is quite easy (but requires server access so not any editor can do that) and not something we do too often. The edit requires two things: a new card on the homepage, and adding the language code to the <select> field in the search bar. It might also require an edit in another file that we found, but whose name I don't remember now.

To spice up the new homepage, which looks a bit bare, we decided to have pictures drawn in a line art style that would represent something from the proletarian history of the language (or a country that uses the language) and add it in the cards. We're still figuring out what we want to draw though.

It's a page that's going to change for sure in the future, but we decided to start using it because while it may have less "charm" than the old one at this stage, it's still an improvement due to the responsiveness on mobile.

People generally seem to like it, but at this time we don't have more info than that. They seem to see it as about the same as the old one. It's not a very visited page, most people end up on en.prolewiki.org directly and not through the language selection page.