Funtoo:Wikiverse/Project Pages

   Note

This page is a work in progress.

Introduction

Project pages are sets of pages on the Funtoo wiki under the Project Namespace which are used to organize Funtoo development efforts.

This page is here to get you acquainted with the entire Funtoo Project Page system and how it works. It consists of a MediaWiki namespace, a MediaWiki Page Form, database integration using the MediaWiki Cargo Extension written by Yaron Koren, and several MediaWiki templates.

Project Namespace

This section explains what the Project namespace is and how it works.

In MediaWiki terminology, a "namespace" is a special section of the wiki that is distinct (see this MediaWiki Namespace documentation for more information.) The "main" part of the wiki is in the Main namespace and you can find these pages at the following URLs:

https://www.funtoo.org/A Regular Page

There is also a User namespace, which holds pages that can be used by individual users. This is your user page, which may not exist yet. When creating new content on the wiki, it's expected that you will use a subpage of your user page as its initial home.

MediaWiki also has a special namespace called the Project namespace. This namespace was added to MediaWiki to provide "meta-discussions related to the operation and development of the wiki". For Funtoo, we use this namespace not just for wiki development but also for content related to Funtoo Linux projects.

Project namespace URLs are special, because you can get to them two ways:

https://www.funtoo.org/Project:Wikiverse
https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Wikiverse

The URLs above are equivalent. This is because the Project namespace has a special property where it has two names -- one is the literal Project which is hard-coded into all MediaWiki implementations. The other URL varies from wiki to wiki, and is determined based on the wiki name -- specifically the $wgSitename configuration parameter. Since the Funtoo wiki has $wgSiteName set to "Funtoo", this is also an alternate name for the Project namespace on the Funtoo wiki. In fact, if you go to the first URL displayed above, the wiki will redirect you to the one with the Funtoo: prefix since they are considered equivalent.

Overview

OK, now that we've covered the Project namespace, let's give a brief overview of Project Pages. Project Pages are a Funtoo thing, which uses MediaWiki's Project namespace to organize Funtoo development and other efforts. The idea is that each of these efforts has its own page which is used to organize the effort as well as offer a means for Funtoo users to be informed of project status as well as find ways to get more directly involved in specific Funtoo efforts.

One thing to keep in mind about Project pages is that we are constantly adding new stuff -- not only new projects, but also new functionality to the project pages. So this information will likely change often and you are encouraged to come back here often.

Form and Template Basics

Project pages use a page form located at Form:Project, which can be used to create a new Project. This "Form" is part of the Page Forms MediaWiki extension and provides a "user interface" to populate your new Project page with several templates that are necessary for the Project page to function. The primary template to enable Project page functionality is Template:Project. This template defines various project metadata, and also handles storing this metadata in a database using the Cargo MediaWiki extension. Therefore, your project page must contain this template.

   Important

Each Project Page must use the Template:Project template, which is best created using Form:Project.