Background
Yesterday, I deployed Growth features to about 10 wikis (in dark mode, which is the challenging part). After finishing the deployment, I have a couple of suggestions how could we improve the process even further, saving time on my end.
Issues with the current deployment procedure
initWikiConfig.php overrides already existing config
The script @Urbanecm_WMF uses to prefill the configuration will happily rewrite already existing configuration when told to. This is not an issue if I remember that every time I run it, but it would be safer if it just yelled at me if I'm overwriting anything (if it's really the intention, it should be possible to overrule it, obviously).
Subtasked as T287973.
initWikiConfig.php needs Phabricator task ID
When the initWikiConfig script is executed to prefill the configuration, it wants me to tell it the Phabricator ID for the task where the deployment was requested. That's then used in the edit summary, to tell the communities why the change is made.
The issue is that with the latest deployment batch, the Phabricator ID varies for every wiki. This forced me to run the script ten times with different Phab ID. It's not a big issue with ten wikis, but with an even bigger deployment, this would definitely become a bottleneck.
This can probably be fixed by @Trizek-WMF – maybe we can create a task like "Round 4 deployment of Growth wikis", link that from the edit summary? I'm also open to other solutions, the goal is to have an edit summary like https://kk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=2899325 that is informative for the community.
Help panel label translations
With the current deployment procedure, the labels for help panel links are included in the deployment task, and then need to be copied manually to Special:EditGrowthConfig by...someone. That's not the easiest way to do it – can we improve this?
Suggestions:
- Do not include them at all and leave communities/@Trizek-WMF to do it after wiki is promoted to a dark mode
- Add them as messages to translatewiki.net, and only start the deployment after the messages are translated there
- Something else?
Special page aliases
As of now, special page aliases need to be copied to our codebase, as they cannot be changed from TWN. There are two things we can do with it:
- if we want to keep translating them, add them to translatewiki as messages and write a script to update the file in Growth's codebase
- Stop caring about them, as they only affect the URL -- nothing else.
I'm claiming this, as I'll probably lead the simplification process -- however, input is appreciated here, especially from @Trizek-WMF as he takes care about scaling the features from community standpoint.
Also pinging @DMburugu to help with prioritizing the work here. I think it's more important than dashboard, but of course, it's completely your call.