Roadmap
Items marked with an "[independent]" are projects that could theoretically be done by an independent developer. If you're interested in helping SMW users, and/or becoming more involved in SMW development, by taking on such a project, and you have any questions, feel free to write about it to the mailing list.
On bugzilla
SMW 1.8
When: Mid 2012
Drop compatibility with MW < 1.17
Who: Jeroen De Dauw
Drop compatibility with MediaWiki 1.16.x and earlier, so features introduced in 1.17, primarily the Resource Loader and JavaScript libraries, can be fully used. This includes removal of current backwards compatibility code that then becomes obsolete.
Compatibility with Validator 0.5
Who: Jeroen De Dauw
Validator 0.5 is a rewrite aiming at performance improvements, easier usage and better extensibility. Although not a lot of compatibility will be lost for SMW, the code should be changed to use new-style parameter definitions.
SMW 1.9
When: End 2012
Drop compatibility with MW < 1.18
Who: Jeroen De Dauw
Drop compatibility with MediaWiki 1.17.x and earlier, so features introduced in 1.18, primarily the RequestContext related functionality and various JavaScript libraries, can be fully used. This includes removal of current backwards compatibility code that then becomes obsolete.
Todos without a target
SMW core
Improve query argument handling
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
Recent versions of SMW introduced use of the Validator extension for parameter handling. As of SMW 1.7, this includes all parameters passed to query printers. This means we can now get rid of all the custom code passing along values to the code constructing "further results" links, which in a lot of cases misses arguments and is out of date (and is now completely silly since we can have a generic system). On top of that, there still is now obsolete parameter handling code at various places that should be identified and taken out.
Make Special:Ask sane
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
Current ask code is not very decent and could benefit a lot from a full rewrite, making use of current MW and SMW features. Or it could just be ditched in favour of a new query UI if that gets created and brought to a usable and stable point.
Replace #info pop-up code
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
The current JavaScript used for pop-ups in SMW, such as these used by #info, is far from ideal. It makes use of deprecated MediaWiki JS, which will probably be removed around 1.20, and the pop-ups have a fixed size and do not adapt to their content. This can be done better using some jQuery plugin or so. [independent]
Modernize maintenance scripts
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
The maintenace scripts still use the old system, and should be migrated to use a class extending Maintenance, as is already done for the setup maintenance script. [independent]
Finish up new query UI
Contact person: Markus Krötzsch
Finish work on Special:QueryUI
RequestContext refactoring
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
When MW 1.18 becomes the min requirement, we can make use of the RequestContext functionality and get rid of many many globals. Also need to figure out if anything in SMW should derive from this class or at least implement RequestContext.
JavaScript base for dynamic result formats
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
Who: Jeroen De Dauw (won't be able to make time in this period)
Add a small JavaScript base for interacting with the ask API that can be used by dynamic result formats to load additional data or re-load their data after page load.
Improve smwdoc
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
The #smwdoc parser hook allows for automatically documenting parameters supported by the result formats using Validator. Right now it just lists the name, type, default value and a small description. It could also list other info available, most notably the criteria, such as that it needs to be "one of these values" or "in the range of" or "be longer then x characters" or whatever. To not clutter the UI, this should be done in a way that it is not shown by default, but rather that the param info can be expanded (using some nice jQuery effects ofc :) when the user chooses to. This requires creating a separate display class for param info that just gets given a list of params, being completely SMW agnostic and places in the Validator extension (so it can be used by the #describe hook there as well) and then modifying #smwdoc to make use of this. [independent]
Other improvements that can be done to #smwdoc:
- ...
Improve JSON format
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
The JSON format currently manually encodes the data, causing many inconsistencies and bugs (and historically had security issues as well, which might not all be gone). It would be a lot better to create the data structure using php arrays and then serializing it using FormatJSON::encode or json_encode.
Relevant files:
- [{{{2}}}.{{{3}}} JSON result printer]
- [{{{2}}}.{{{3}}} Helper used by ask API to create a PHP structure to serialize]
Introduce result format Atom
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
As Atom becomes more and more popular result formats SMW does not support it so far, as opposed to RSS. Having this format would be good. [independent]
Introduce an Operator to Negate Queries
Contact person: Nischayn22
Negating a query would be a nice feature. It could also be used to fetch pages where a Property isn't set to any value. The Operator "NOT" is being proposed to be used for this functionality. (See bug 31269)
SMW-based extensions
Semantic Drilldown
Contact person: Yaron Koren
Planned and desired future developments for Semantic Drilldown:
- the ability to drill down on concepts, not just categories.
- fix the HTML and CSS of the Special:BrowseData page so that the last column doesn't get displaced by the list of categories. [independent]
Semantic Forms
Contact person: Yaron Koren
See the Semantic Forms "planned features" section.
Semantic Maps
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw
See the mapping roadmap.
Semantic Result Formats
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw or Yaron Koren
Plans for some of the formats defined in Semantic Result Formats:
- Exhibit rewrite
- 'jqplotbar' format - allow for more than one number-series on the same bar chart. [independent]
- 'outline' format - allow for the setting of a "sub-format" for each sub-grouping, using a new parameter perhaps called "innerformat=". [independent]
- 'outline' format - add support for a "template=" parameter, similar to the ones found in various other formats. [independent]
- 'ploticus' format - fix the security leak in this (currently-disabled) format. [independent]
- 'timeline/eventline' format - add support for a "template=" parameter. [independent]
- 'exhibit' format - there are various bugs in the Javascript that need to be fixed. [independent]
SemanticSignup
The SemanticSignup extension needs to be fixed to work with the latest version of Semantic Forms. [independent]
It also needs to get support for captchas. Right now people can not sign up via this extension when captchas are enabled, because it does not show them. [independent]
Semantic Project Management
The Semantic Project Management extension needs to be fixed to work with the latest version of Semantic MediaWiki. [independent]
- A patch was provided with bug 35882 that has to be reviewed and committed. --[[kgh]] 16:30, 26 April 2012 (CEST)
Halo extensions
Enhancements and new functionality that will be implemented in 2010/2011 within the suite of Halo extensions are described at smwforum.ontoprise.com.
Fix up SMWRegistry
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw or Markus Krötzsch
SMWRegistry is an extrension written for this wiki that allows people to register their SMW wikis via Special:SMWAdmin, which then makes them displayed here on Special:SMWRegistry. Ths extension is rather old and could use some work:
- It does not pull user count, page count, ect, data from recent MediaWikis. This could be fixed by using the API of the wiki being registered to obtain the data rather then doing weird HTML parsing.
- The registry page here could be a lot nicer. It could use MediaWikis TablePager as a base, to end up having something like on this page.
- The code in general could be improved, including utilization of more recent MediaWiki facilities.
- It would be awesome if registration provided some hook or trigger for other scripts to do their stuff. We could have a twitter account and an IRC bot on the smw channel report newly registered wikis!
It'd be a plus to have this all work in a more generic fashion that allows the code to be used by othere extensions as well. MediaWiki lacks real software distribution and installation mechanisms. Once these are created, this tool would lose some of it's usefullness, but I don't see this happening any time soon.
Semantic Watchlist
Contact person: Jeroen De Dauw and Yaron Koren
The Semantic Watchlist extension needs UI polishing and some bugfixing. It's currently in early beta stage, so it needs to be fully tested and the issues that are found should be fixed before it can be considered stable. [independent]
Features that can be added:
- Watch single pages (via a watch tab) [independent]
- Diff coloring [independent]
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