Priyanka's Scrapbook

The first Mozilla South Asia Inter-Community meet-up took place in Kathmandu, Nepal, on 23-24 February 2013, with the coordination from Mozilla Nepal Regional community. It brought together community leaders from the South Asia, including paid staff from across the SAARC countries , to meet for 3 days of presentations, breakout sessions and discussions to plan the implementation of the Mozilla South Asia community road map for 2013 and ensure that the regional community is fully aligned with greater engagement efforts across the Mozilla organization. The Wiki Link against this event is here. Well, after the initial introduction (the above content is copied directly from the Wiki page), I will share my experience of this event though this blog. Why not start from the top! I reached Nepal on the 22nd of February, 2013 by around 3pm. Well, to be honest, the Kathmandu airport is kind of messed up. It took me some time to even find the right Immigration form before actually q...

Building gadgets in MediaWiki is awesomely simple and real fun. Well, I wasn't actually aware of it, until I attended the Gadget building workshop in GNUnify last week, taken by Yuvi, Sucheta and Harsh. Initial step didn't sound much interesting to me, as they were mostly talking stuff which I was already aware of and tried hands on, but Yuvi probably understood my disappointment, and soon came to my rescue with some really cool and interesting stuff. Writing JavaScript files in my own MediaWiki was a regular job which I had tried a few times already, but blending some cool Ajax codes in those JavaScript files was a real fun thing to learn. It was like mixing some cream in my rich coffee :P Learning to make use of Special:ApiSandbox made life so much easier for me. Coding made so much easy using the multiple options here. Sitting right there, did manage to put some Ajax codes into a js file and make it work fine.  The learning didn't stop there. The fun continued as Yuv...

Taking from the top: I got a clean MediaWiki installed from Git on January 14 2013, with the following extensions: • Cite • ParserFunctions • Gadgets • Vector • WikiEditor • SyntaxHighlight What are Extensions on MediaWiki? Ans: Extensions are powerful tools on Media Wiki which lets one customize the way their wiki looks and works. How to install these extensions on a clean Wiki? Downloading these extensions https://www.mediawiki.or/wiki/Manual:Extensions documents how different extensions are to be downloaded and installed on a Wiki. The Wikimedia SVN repositories hosts all extensions. This repository is located at svn:trunk/extensions. After being downloaded, these extensions make home in their own own subdirectory of $IP/extensions/.(*IP means the full path to the installation directory. It stands for Install Path.) Installing the downloaded extensions This process is generally simple. We just need to add one line at the end of the LocalSettings.php file (but above the...

Anyone who has worked on the MediaWiki CMS, will probably know how difficult it is to handle this CMS at times. If you have ever edited Wikipedia pages (here I am referring mainly to the English Wikipedia i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/ ), you will be aware of the 'Cite' option that you get at the right hand top corner of your editor. The 'citation' option is used for adding references in your document. You must be aware that when you create a new Wikipage on any Wikipedia, you need to add some relevant references against it. This is made very easy using the 'Cite' option. It gives the user, a template where the user can simply fill in some details to get the reference going, no need to worry about the tags (they are auto-generated ). This 'Cite' option which is present in the English Wikipedia is actually missing from most other Wikipedia(s) . It is not at all an easy task to get the Citation option in place and working. You can read on how to get...

The Mozillians of Pune did meet at Barista today to discuss about Mozilla's participation in GNUnify'13 . I don't wanna spoil the surprises of D -day, but just wanted to give a small glimpse to all the attendees of GNUnify'13 as to what they can expect here this time. Well, if you are attending GNUnify'13, here is a list of things you can expect from Mozilla: At the Mozilla b ooth,  you can go and grab several Mozilla goodies, get to see the new Firefox OS phone and much more. Get to learn about Webmaker and start contributing to Mozilla in minutes. Web is for all....young or old. Learn about Mozilla's most recent project - GenOpen (Generation Open). Learn more about how you can be a part of Mozilla community and help Mozilla grow. If you are developer, its your chance to learn more about Mozilla development projects and how to get involved with them. If you are a Wom a n and a FOSS enthusiast, but confused about where to begin from, get guided here ...

From developers to event organizers...thats what has happened to the MscCA students of SICSR at present.  GNUnify, one of Asia's most renowned Open Source Tech fest is round the corner. As the dates get closer the work load as well as enthusiasm keeps getting higher on head. From poster design to website building...from script writing to publicity work...all coordinated from one single room, SDRC . From morning 8am till late 11pm...no complaints, no demands...only dedicated work. A whole lot of jobs and a series of struggles...a whole lot of learning all happening here. You need to be here to believe in it. Sometimes, the not so important issues are the ones which needs most attention like getting the T-shirts printed, getting the posters done, sending down invitation mails and so on and so forth. In the past few days, did a lot of stupid manual jobs which under normal circumstances, I would have never ever done like getting letters drafted, sending down mails, taking emai...

I have handled a lot of CMS for different works in everyday life like Drupal, Wordpress, Red Mine etc but one of the most difficult CMS that I have come across till date is MediaWiki.  Sometimes, the tougher a job is, the more interesting it turns out to be. MediaWiki installation on my local machine was not a touch job, rather was not a part of my job at all, the real challenge began when I started playing around with all the extensions. Unlike other CMS, Media Wiki is not that easy to deal with...mainly when it comes to properly implementing a few extensions. There are a whole lot of JavaScript files which needs to be handled and handled really well.  My initial task was to document how to get the 'Citation' template on my own wiki editor's toolbar. After small struggle through a few complicated and messy JavaScript files, that work finally got done.  The next challenge was or rather still is to customize the options of the Citation template (which generally is...