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Wikimedia Mobile ↑

This is the new mobile project brought to you by the fine folks at Wikimedia.

The goal of the project is to give access to Wikipedia to all sorts of different mobile devices in all sorts of different languages.

The basic principle is to modify the Wikipedia pages in such a way that they are well suited to a large number of devices.

Initially, XHTML/WebKit phones are the primary target. However, work has already begun on WML devices.

Currently Supported devices:

  • iPhone (OS 2 and 3)

  • Android (G1 and G2)

  • webOS (Palm Pre)

  • Kindle 2

Hope to target:

  • Blackberry (various versions)

  • Symbian

  • Windows Mobile

We Need You! ↑

This is an open source project and we need lots of help, so go down a bit further to get things running.

Getting Running ↑

1) Install Ruby 1.9 and RubyGems www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

2) Install Merb 1.1 wiki.merbivore.com/howto/installation/edge or if its released at wiki.merbivore.com/howto/installation/gems

Also make sure to install all the gems listed in GEMS

3) Setup host headers for en.m.wikitest.org, *.m.wikitest.org for any language that you want to test. Anything works, but it needs to start with a language code. Point each one at 127.0.0.1 assuming you don’t have some sort of freaky setup. For instance…

127.0.0.1	en.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	ja.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	de.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	fr.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	pl.m.wikitest.org
127.0.0.1	es.m.wikitest.org

4) Install Git git-scm.com/download

5) Checkout the project with the command…

git clone git://github.com/hcatlin/wikimedia-mobile.git

6) Go into the new folder and type

merb -a thin

We need to use thin because currently Mongrel doesn’t work on Ruby 1.9. If thin isn’t installed ‘gem install thin`

7) Browse to en.m.wikitest.org:4000 in Safari (most useful as webkit is the main target)

8) Install Palm Pre, Android, and iPhone Simulators

*You can find lots of info about this around the web*

9) Start hacking!

What should I work on? ↑

Just run this command…

rake todo:list

And you should get a nice list of things that are needed

How are languages used? ↑

In the config/init.rb file, we load up all of the language settings from a file in config/translations/#{lang}.yaml since really each language is a different Wikipedia install. Let’s look at an example entry. (May be very out of date!)

--- 
go_button_small: Go
search_results: Search Results
no_article_found: No Article Found
featured_article: Today's Featured Article
in_the_news: In The News
home_button: Home
random_button: Random
regular_wikipedia: View this page on regular Wikipedia
perm_stop_redirect: Permanently disable mobile site
error_page_title: We have a problem!
error_page_text: "Wikipedia mobile is still under active development and we are working hard to fix all of our internal errors. We have been notified about this error and will be fixing it soon. Please check back!"
copyright: "Text is available under the <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License'>Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License</a>; additional terms may apply. See <a href='http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use'>Terms of Use</a> for details. Wikipedia\xC2\xAE is a registered trademark of the <a href='http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/'>Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.</a>, a non-profit organization."

A General Primer ↑

With all of the different formats we have to support, there is a fairly simple system for correlating a Device with a Format with some specific actions to take based on that Format.

Process:

  • A request comes in from a browser

  • The request generates a Device object in merb/extensions/request_extension.rb

  • The Device object picks a format in Device#format_name

** Any method_missing that Device receives is looked up in the format specfication ** The formats are specified in config/formats.yml

  • An Article is fetched for that device

** First, the article figures out what kind of parser needed to be run on the page ** It then generates a key with that parser type. ** It then checks to see if that has been cached ** If it is not cached, it grabs scrapes the Wikipedia page and processes it with some /app/models/parsers/* class ** If it is cached, it returns that cached object

  • The layout is generated with the returned Article#html

** The device format is used heavily here (aka, “= current_device.stylesheet_name”) ** An “app/views/layouts/search#{format}.html.haml” file is rendered in the search area ** Changes in the search box and CSS fiels are the most different between formats

A Primer in CSS ↑

This is where we do a lot of work to make sure every format looks great on the device. We utilize Sass for this. CSS is now Valid sass, but we use imports to make sure that we aren’t repeating code and are only loading one CSS file per request.

Whenever we deploy, we generate out a CSS file for each of the formats (some formats share them, but that’s specified in formats.yml) that contains some shared bits of CSS (namely, _tables.sass and webkit.sass)

If you are going to work on the CSS, do not directly edit the CSS files. They will be automatically overwritten by the Sass files.

For more information on Sass, please visit www.sass-lang.com for a tutorial about Sass’ powerful features

A Primer in Formats ↑

Formats are the main mechanism used to correlate Devices with their differing behaviours. A basic format looks something like this:

html: &defaults
  view_format: 'html'
  search_bar: 'default'
  with_layout: "application"
  css_file_name: "default"
  supports_javascript: false

capable: &capable
  <<: *defaults
  supports_javascript: true

webkit: &webkit
  <<: *capable
  search_bar: 'webkit'
  css_file_name: 'webkit'

We are using some of the magic of YAML here to help generate these. “capable” is a copy of the “html” format, but with one change… we enable javascript. “webkit” has the same properties as “capable”, but we specify a new search bar and a new css file name. You can see this throughout the file. It allows us to be very, very specific with how we deal with a particular device.

Random Useful Things ↑

People Who Have Helped! ↑

Well, because I’m lazy and I hate versioning this kind of thing… check out Ohloh to find out who has worked on this project the most! www.ohloh.net/p/wikimedia-mobile/contributors

But seriously, this thing wouldn’t be possible at all if it weren’t for all of the amazing developers out there who have spent their free time making Wikimedia Mobile totally freaking awesome.