The Wikimedia Language Engineering team recently completed their latest development sprint, with a special focus on preparing for the upcoming deployment of the Universal Language Selector (ULS) extension on multiple wikis. The team also hosted a ULS-specific office hour on May 8, 2013 (logs).
ULS deployment prep
The Language Engineering team is working on refining several important features of the Universal Language Selector. This extension will provide an umbrella of services including selection of UI language, input tools and fonts. ULS will superannuate Narayam and Webfonts to provide a unified solution for configuring language settings for MediaWiki. During this development sprint, critical bugs related to positioning of ULS’ activation area and its “cog icon” label were fixed. These affected multiple MediaWiki skins and interlanguage wiki pages. The improved version will be deployed over several phases. More information about the upcoming deployment can be found in the deployment schedule.
ULS testing
ULS features are to be verified based on the test scenarios identified. These scenarios, based on the Cucumber framework, can be adapted for automatic as well as manual testing. The scenarios cover core features of ULS: triggers, language settings panel, display settings, font selection and input tools selection. These have been written in a simple “Given-When-Then” format and provide the steps for easy walkthroughs. The testing instance hosts all the latest updates that are being made. The team is looking for volunteers who can help us with testing and reporting bugs. Let us know if you would like to join and help (write to runa at wikimedia dot org or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n) .
What’s next
The team will be completing all feature changes and testing them by end of the current sprint to be ready for kicking-off the roll-out of phase 1 of ULS. Roll-out will be coordinated by Niklas Laxström with administrators of all scheduled wikis. The team will also be hosting a bug triage session on May 29, 2013 on freenode.net IRC on the #mediawiki-i18n channel.
ULS is live on Commons!
Meanwhile, based on consensus reached by the Commons community, Universal Language Selector and the Translate extensions have been enabled on Commons.
For more details about the Language Engineering projects and ways to participate, please write to me [runa at wikimedia dot org] or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering
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