Guide:Kawachan 1.5 (Meta, no ontology)

Revision as of 00:29, 11 February 2011 by Keiji (Talk | contribs)

Kawachan 1.5 is the branch of Kawachan you are reading right now. This page will list updates made to it.

Since the changelog was only started on August 15, 2010 anything before that is an approximation.

Kawachan 1.5.6 (February 10, 2011)

Feature: Brand new ontology system, to replace MediaWiki's category system which has proved inadequate for so long.

Upgrade: MediaWiki upgraded to 1.16.2.
Removed: Winter extension removed, because it's freaking annoying.
Removed: Files no longer work. A brand new gallery system is in development and file embedding will return with Kawachan 1.6.
Change: New ExPar syntax: <[ ... ]>. The original one hasn't been removed yet, but will be later. This replaces all Winter commands, such as #linkfarm, #db-parse and #audio. It has also obsoleted the {{DB parser}} template. You might notice that this was the syntax used for embedding images, which is one reason why image support has been temporarily removed.

Change: Infoboxes on pages now appear in the sidebar.
Feature: You can now move the sidebar to the right, or have it appear on both sides with the widgets split into two columns for easier reading. As always, the option is in your account settings.

Change: The original MonoBook skin has been restored, with the Kawachan skin moved to... well, the Kawachan skin, where it should be. New special pages (the ones with the initial colon) force the Kawachan skin for internal reasons, but you'll have to change your skin to Kawachan in your preferences to get "normal" pages to show up properly, since the other skins don't support all the features (e.g. gallery, page rating) of the Kawachan skin.
Change: The following features have been made globally optional: page quality rating, files/galleries, forum widget, chat widget, ads, word filter. This doesn't affect anything (except for removing the false statement "Bad words are BLOCKED" from your account settings), but will make the imminent Kawachan-Kumizone split much easier.
Change: The footer CSS and text has seen some minor changes. In particular, it now displays the current version of Kawachan.

Fix: When editing file information, apostrophes no longer terminate the values of a text box.
Change: Logging in now does not display the option to remember your password; this option is now always used. There was a bug where if you did not tick this option, non-MediaWiki modules would not detect that you were logged in.

Fix: Pages now display the correct rating when on a different tab (e.g. links, history etc.) and do not keep changing categories on :BestPages.
Feature: Chat and forum activity is now displayed in the sidebar. This can be turned off in your account settings.
Feature: New Winter function <nowinter>{{#linkfarm}}</nowinter>. This is used in the format <nowinter>{{#linkfarm|[[target 1]]|[[target 2]]|...|text}}</nowinter>, and is intended to replace the various places throughout Kawachan where we currently link arbitrary parts of a word/phrase to different targets. For an example, see this diff. The square brackets around each target are necessary for it to function correctly; it has been designed to not alter the link detection systems.
Feature: :LinksFrom can now sort by maximum common category depth (mcd). Non-existant pages have mcd = 0, while existing pages have a positive mcd, where the higher the number the more closely related the pages on either end of the link are. With this feature it's easier to spot Walled Gardens, as pages in these will have many links with high mcd, whereas more "branchy" articles will have many links with low mcd. Branchy articles are generally considered better.
Feature: Managers can now (at long last) delete files. They can also remove files from galleries without having to manually edit the file's categories.

Fix: Page rating system now does not erroneously mark some crap pages as unassessed.
Feature: New special page :BestPages, which lists all assessed pages grouped by quality. ~~Currently there is no link to this page from anywhere but this changelog.~~ This is now linked to from the header.
Feature: Support for HTML5 Ogg Vorbis audio embed. This will hopefully replace YouTube embeds that are only used for music. However, at the moment, such music must be uploaded manually by Keiji.
- A bandwidth limiter has also been implemented to protect against abuse of this feature. See Guide:Audio limit.

Fix: Several bugfixes to the recently-added LinksFrom module, along with new options to change how redirects are viewed there.
Feature: You can now use ExPar to put YouTube videos in the sidebar.

Feature: You can now see a list of all outbound links from an article, along with the total number of pages linking to the target. This is helpful when identifying which new wanted pages have been summoned by a new article.
- For an example, try clicking the Links tab on this page, then "Show outbound links".

Feature: Category links (in sidebar and listings; NOT manual category links like "[[:Category:Categories]]") now appear with an icon to their left, which is one of the following:
1. a single page (in listings only), meaning a "leaf" article
2. three pages with a question mark, meaning a category with no main article
3. three pages with horizontal lines, meaning a category with a main article.
- In the third case, clicking the text link takes you to the main article (where as of the previous update category contents are displayed). The category page itself is accessible by clicking the icon, which also appears on the main article itself.
- A warning is displayed on internal category pages (those category pages with an associated main article), as a general reader should have no reason to be viewing one.

Feature: Pages which are the main article of a category A now display A's contents at the bottom of the page, and copy A's categories for their sidebar.
- Good example: Video game. The listing makes the page rather more useful.
  - Bad example: Touhou Project. Pages/subcategories which appear as sections (in this case "Games") should link the section heading and not appear in the list at the bottom.

Fix: you can now change a file's categories after uploading it.
Feature: Managers can now rearrange the pictures in a gallery (most importantly for changing the default image that appears in a page's sidebar).
- Although this functionality should be available to all users, it will probably stay restricted until Kawachan 2 appears for technical reasons involving logging.

Feature: Link colors and category ranks added (optional in your account settings).