Admin Forum:How does the bookmark widget work?

It says

"Add your favorite pages by clicking 'add' icon above"

but there is no "add" button. Should I have used something other than

Bookmark

or is this widget broken?

Pecoes 11:20, February 12, 2012 (UTC)


 * Are all widgets broken? I also tried RecentChanges, NewPages and Contribs. At first sight they seemed to work, but apparently they merely output static HTML. When I came back to the page 24 hours later they still showed the exact same - by now outdated - lists.


 * What exactly is the point of widgets?


 * Pecoes 13:47, February 13, 2012 (UTC)


 * Can you give a link to the wiki or page with this problem? It sounds like an old wiki that was never fully updated for the latest Oasis skin. Wikia's previous skin called Monaco supported widgets, but Oasis does not. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 13 Feb 2012 1:17 PM Pacific


 * Here's the page with the static/broken widgets:


 * Jade_Empire_Modding_Wiki:Community_Portal


 * The wiki is brand new. It was founded a little over two months ago and it yes, it does use the Oasis skin. Does that mean I can forget about widgets? And if so, would it be a problem, if I write my own?


 * Pecoes 21:35, February 13, 2012 (UTC)


 * I looked at the history for that page and it looks like you (Pecoes) added the widget code, but it probably never worked. You obviously decided to add it for some reason and copied it from somewhere. Did it work where you copied it from (and where would that be?)?
 * The short answer is that the  tag may work in some rare cases, but shouldn't since support for it was supposed to have been taken away.
 * Widgets in the sense of modules developed by Wikia using the  tag should not be used, but widgets as a concept (small functional modules of code not normally supported in standard wikicode) still exist, but may break if Wikia does something to make them incompatible.
 * See w:c:wow:Template:WoW_Answers_widget for an example of a widget that was re-implemented for Oasis to replace something similar that could be done by the  tag in the old Monaco skin.
 * New widgets take alot more initiative and experimentation and are not as easy or reliable as the old ones, but when Wikia takes away, sometimes you can work around it. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 13 Feb 2012 2:56 PM Pacific


 * Alright. That settles it. Widgets don't work. Thanks! That's bad news, but thanks!


 * This is where I got the widget code from btw: Help:WidgetTag. I wasn't made aware of the fact that the shared help is not an official/advisable source of information.


 * Apart from widgets I've also been looking at bots over the weekend to find out if I could automate certain rather boring edits. Most of the PHP classes I found had very little documentation (if any) and at first I was a little put off. But then I read the source code of botclasses.php and was surprised how simple it was! It turns out all the heavy lifting is done by Wikia's/Wikipedia's own API. That's a remarkably powerful interface! Wow! Just wow!


 * Whether you use that API with PHP via CURL or with JavaScript via AJAX makes not much of a difference really. I'm moderately optimistic that it shouldn't take too much time to come up with a JS solution or two.


 * It depends on the widget though. Purely informational widgets like the NewPages widget should be relatively easy to rewrite. The bookmark widget is a different story because it requires some sort of persistent storage. That would take a bit of doing. That answers widget looks a lot more complicated than that though...


 * Pecoes 02:53, February 14, 2012 (UTC)


 * Anything widgets you could re-create would be great. The sad state of Wikia help is unfortunate. I'll mark the page you looked at as obsolete. Some of the widgets actually still work, but I think they are technically not supported and were designed primarily to use in the now un-modifiable sidebar (which was on the left side in Monaco).
 * The code for the answers widget only looks complicated. Here it is: w:c:wow:MediaWiki::WoW_Answers_form
 * The rest is just HTML and using the  tag. -- Fandyllic  (talk &middot; contr) 14 Feb 2012 11:15 AM Pacific


 * I just got an email from Wikia staff. According to that mail the widget extension wasn't enabled for my wiki. The widgets seem to sort of work now. After manually purging the page the widgets update. Whether they update without purging and if so how often I cannot say yet. I'll keep you posted!


 * I must have misunderstood what that Answers widget(?) does. That is indeed simple. :)


 * Pecoes 19:25, February 14, 2012 (UTC)


 * The widgets NewPages, RecentChanges and Contribs work very well now. Apparently that initial purge was needed to get them started. They update now with every page load + reload.


 * Nice!


 * Pecoes 21:50, February 14, 2012 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I've been trying them out also. Apparently alot are still supported. Some won't work (like ShoutBox). I'm going through the list and I'll update the help page with what I find. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 22:40, 14 February 2012


 * I'm afraid I have to take back what I previously said. I forgot to clean my URL-bar of that "&action=purge" appendage. So all this time that I thought the widgets were working nicely, I was purging the cache again and again and again. As soon as I stopped purging and requested the page the way any ordinary visitor would, the widgets stopped updating. Even when I opened the page in another browser - one in which I wasn't logged in - I could still see my contributions. In what universe would that be useful? *sigh*


 * Well, I'll keep communicating with staff over this, but I'll also resume work on my own widgets.


 * Pecoes 22:53, February 14, 2012 (UTC)


 * Here is a proof-of-concept RecentPages widget. It updates on page load and every 60 seconds thereafter.


 * Pecoes 02:37, February 15, 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm... I didn't try the purge thing, but I did test all the widgets listed at the help page. See Admin Forum:Widgets from Monaco for what I found. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 15 Feb 2012 10:57 AM Pacific


 * You tried RecentChanges, NewPages and Contribs? And they worked for you? Without purging? Odd. They did not like me that much.


 * Well, I'm not sure I care anymore... I'm working on our new landing page with the self-made versions of these widgets right now.


 * Did you check out my proof-of-concept? It needs a bit of tweaking and a lot of CSS but I'm quite happy with it already. The NewPages and the Contribs widgets will be virtually identical. The only difference will be the QUERY_STRING.


 * Pecoes 19:11, February 15, 2012 (UTC)


 * I will check out your proof-of-concept. When I say working, I'm saying it in the loosest sense. It may not update reliably or be bug-free. Not working means I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything useful. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 15 Feb 2012 1:58 PM Pacific


 * I have a little more than a proof-of-concept now. Here is a working demo for the new landing page.


 * You'll probably notice that the Contributions widget shows my - Pecoes' - contributions and not the visitor's contributions. Since the page isn't hosted by Wikia, I cannot get hold of the visitor's Wikia username...


 * Pecoes 11:19, February 16, 2012 (UTC)