Welcome to Phabricator, Wikimedia's new collaboration platform

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Bugs, tasks, boards, and cards for the masses! The Wikimedia Phabricator project workboard, captured right after the Bugzilla migration.

Wikimedia launches a space for collaboration open to all contributors: phabricator.wikimedia.org. Primarily devoted to software development, this platform also welcomes non-technical projects. Wikimedia Phabricator has been available since September for early adopters. Its prime time starts this week, after having incorporated 73,681 reports migrated from Bugzilla, the bug management tool that has served our projects during a decade. Farewell Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator!
As far as we know, we are maintaining the biggest public Phabricator instance in terms of number of tasks filed. Phabricator is a third-party open-source software development platform that we decided to use for project management, bug reporting, design of new features, and (one day not too far away) code review, all in an integrated fashion. Wikimedia Phabricator has already more than 800 users, who are getting their Bugzilla activity automatically assigned. New users can join and claim their Bugzilla history as well.

Main features

[protected-iframe id=”ccf1b1a2b14f3d01748d258a622cda65-67752302-1374241″ info=”//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Very_Basics_of_Phabricator.ogg?embedplayer=yes” width=”300″ height=”169″ frameborder=”0″]The Very Basics of Phabricator, a Wikimedia Tech Talk on video.

Phabricator comes with many improvements over Bugzilla:

  • The desktop UI looks contemporary. Most features are mobile-friendly as well. Interacting via email is possible.
  • Users can log in with their Wikimedia (SUL) credentials, and the LDAP access used for Labs and Gerrit is available as well. Email addresses are finally private.
  • Bug reporters, developers, designers, product managers, and other contributors use the same tool to discuss issues, features, and other tasks.
  • Tasks are editable, and can be assigned to multiple projects. In fact, projects are like tags in a flat structure.
  • There are workboards for project planning, and possibility to upload mockups and add notes.
  • Users enjoy auto-saved comments while typing.
  • Users can edit their own comments (with history).
  • There is no mid-air collision when someone adds a comment while you are writing yours.

Known issues

In general, fluent Bugzilla users who are new to Phabricator will need a few days to get used to the different paradigms this tool proposes.
There are some areas that require improvement:

  • Suggestions for duplicates when creating a new task.
  • Even if Phabricator’s search is powered by Elasticsearch, it needs some fine-tuning to get to Bugzilla’s efficiency.
  • Advanced Bugzilla users will also find that some actions take more clicks (assigning blocker/blocking tasks, for instance).

There is a complete list of known issues and we will keep working on them after the launch.

Key features implemented

Wikimedia Phabricator’s homepage, after the Bugzilla migration and reopening.

Phabricator is free software available for anybody. The Wikimedia Phabricator team has worked on key features to adapt it to our projects:

  • Migration script keeping relevant data and metadata, allowing users to claim their activity from different services and unify it in Phabricator.
  • Wikimedia Single User Login.
  • Private tasks accessible to a user group and reporters.
  • Separate file hosting domain.
  • Automatic redirects from old Bugzilla reports to Phabricator tasks.
  • Wikimedia username visible in Phabricator user profile.
  • Custom IRC bot to report activity.
  • Updated interwiki links and wiki templates (e.g. phab:T2001)

Also, we have updated a lot of on-wiki documentation that was related to Bugzilla. Those pages now refer and point to Phabricator.
The Phabricator upstream developers have also implemented many features and bugfixes based on our feedback, and we really appreciate their support with this undertaking.

Bugzilla archived

Existing links to Bugzilla reports are automatically redirected to their equivalent Phabricator tasks. Wikimedia Phabricator already had 1,391 tasks before the migration, and we could not assign to Phabricator tasks the same number as their Bugzilla counterparts. Instead, we are providing a memorable solution: just add 2,000 to a Bugzilla number, and you will get its Phabricator task number, i.e. Bug 123 is T2123.
Users can still check the old Bugzilla instance, now retired in read-only mode. They can log in to check their votes and their saved searches, which we could not migrate.

What comes next

Evan Priestley, Phabricator’s main developer (with black shirt) visiting the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco. (“Wikimedia Phabricator Meeting – June 2014 – Photo 2” by Fabrice Florin (WMF), under CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The migration from Bugzilla marks the first step of the migration of the Wikimedia Foundation software development teams (who also need to migrate from Trello and Mingle), and of the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Germany (from Scrumbugz).
The RT migration is underway, coming in a couple weeks. RT is the tool used by the WMF Operations team to handle requests. Expect some thousands of additional tasks coming to Phabricator through this migration.
Code review is the next frontier. The Gerrit Migration Bot has been updated. Diffusion, Phabricator’s code repository browser, is available already now. With Diffusion, developers can import existing repositories, beginning the deprecation of another tool, GitBlit. The migration of the Gerrit code review tool will take more effort and a few months. The actual bottleneck is MediaWiki’s continuous integration system, a tough nut to crack.

Get involved

This is a very exciting project! We welcome your help.

PHP developers are welcome to contribute enhancements and new features upstream. Learn more at Phabricator/Code.
And for Phabricator support and camaraderie, join #wikimedia-devtoolsconnect. See you there!
Quim Gil, Wikimedia Foundation

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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#23363

Is it strategically sound to spend resources on this, while there are many great tools available from Atlassian, Trello etc? Are you committed to develop and maintain this for the next 10+ years?

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#23364

Deniz, I don’t speak for the foundation, but as someone with a few years of IT experience I can tell you that it’s not an decision to be made lightly. As you know picking solutions is mired in many benefits and tradeoffs. Hosted solutions like you’ve listed incur a fee (often per user) that can be financially burdensome. They are often ‘black boxes’ when it comes to extending features or capabilities. Companies come and go, and the cost always rises every year. It’s a for-profit business after all. In my experience when the time comes to move on, export tools… Read more »

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#23365

Do I get you right that your conversion script is self-developed? Will / is it already published somewhere, easing the migration process for other organizations?

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#23366

@deniz, Phabricator is developed and maintained at https://phabricator.org . Their maintainers are committed to develop their platform, yes. We are definitely committed to maintain our instance and contribute upstream in the areas that matter to Wikimedia. Because it’s open source and its PHP, it is a good fit for Wikimedia developers. Meanwhile, with Atlassian or Trello we would be customers hoping that they listen to our requests, and also hoping that they don’t close shop in the next 10+ years.

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#23367

Oliver, yes, we developed the migration script because (as far as we are aware) nobody had migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. All our Phabricator development can be found either at http://git.wikimedia.org/project/phabricator or directly upstream. 100% open source of course, just like the rest of software developed by Wikimedia. More at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Code

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#23368

Removing the “voting on bugs” functionality of Bugzilla is certainly a step backwards… I hope there will be proper replacement system launched in Phabricator soon.

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#23369

Phabricator’s tokens are not votes, but then again in Bugzilla votes were never used to actually vote, as in to give more priority to a certain bug. I actually think that tokens fulfll the same mission, and provide more possibilities to show your support (or dislike).
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/token/

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#23370

I do not know what those “tokens” are, but if they can be assigned to bugs (an possibly other Phabricator content) and if items can be sorted by tokens then that was what the “original” Bugzilla votes were pretty much too about. The intention is to let the community vote on content so that the direction of WMF projects can be properly outsourced and not only set in stone by few people who call themselves “Board of Trustees”. I by no mean want to offend this group of people but simply 10 individuals can will really have a hard time… Read more »

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#23371

You might want to read https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T251
I wish the Board of Trustees (or whoever wants to volunteer) would help us triaging tasks in Phabricator. 😉

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