FOSSMeet 2017

FOSSMeet is an annual event at NIT Calicut that brings together the Free and Open Source Community from around the country.

FOSSMeet is the annual Free and Open source software meet at NIT Calicut. We are inviting proposals for talks and workshops at FOSSMeet 2017.

What we are looking for

Through FOSSMeet, we intend to get the attendees, mostly students, get started with the development and usage of free software. You may propose to conduct a lecture, demo, tutorial, workshop, discussion or panel at FOSSMeet. If the contents of your session is the ‘I am feeling lucky’ result of some Google search, there is low probability that it’ll be accepted. Same applies to proposals titled ‘The absolute beginner introduction to X’ and others on a similar line. On the other hand, if your talk is on some obscure, albeit important, free software project that will go over most students head, this might not be the best platform to deliver that talk. There are always exceptions and we leave that to your judgement. If our audience wants it, we’ll try our best to accommodate it. Of course, if you find people interested in your proposal, you can always call a BoF. We are all for BoF’s! :)

Take the above with a pinch of salt. They are no s̶t̶r̶i̶c̶t̶ ̶r̶u̶l̶e̶s̶, only guidelines. All your proposals are welcome and we celebrate every single one that we receive! :D Looking forward to see you folks here.

Audience

Your audience (mostly) comprises of smart, above average, GNU/Linux aware students.

Important dates

Call for proposals opens: Oct 27, 2016
Proposal submission deadline: Jan 15, 2017
Proposal acceptance: Jan 20, 2017
Presentation upload: Feb 15, 2017

Contact Us:

For more information about speaking and proposals, contact speakers@fossmeet.in.

Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more

Abhinand

@beforeone

MediaWiki Extensions Made Easy

Submitted Jan 8, 2017

What are extensions ? Why is it exciting to work with it ?
Extensions enables developers to not only customize the look of MediaWiki but also to provide new features or reports. Some of the examples of extensions are Echo, Newsletter, Thanks etc. One can develop new extensions or contribute to existing extensions. The extension mostly provide new features for the MediaWiki software.

You can develop extension for
1.Changing look and feel of MediaWiki - Skins alter the color and look of MediaWiki software
2.Adding new features - such as adding new reporting feature
3.Extending markup language
4.Security enhancements

How to install ?
Download/Clone the extension from github repository. Extract the downloaded extension to the folder /mediawiki/extension folder and add a line to LocalSetting.php, forcing the php interpreter to read the extension file, as a result the it can be made available in MediaWiki. Some extension require more procedures during the installations for which the extensions documentation will be helpful.

Need to develop ?
The added feature to the software may benefit people making their work easier. It can also be added to the core mediawiki software if it helps a number of people.

How to start ?
Developing extensions goes through these steps :
1.Setup - “extension.json” file which contains the setup instructions of the extension. Here are few important things to be added to the setup file :
a.Add the classes used by the extension for auto loading
b.Define additional hooks used
c.Setup localisation file
2.Localisation - “en.json” file which is used to store messages in English. The messages with keyword are stored in a JSON file with the documentation for each message in qqq.json file.3.
3.Execution - the implementation portion of the extension

Outline

1.Introduce users to MediaWiki extensions and helps them to make a basic extension in minutes, following the BoilerPlate template.
2.Implement a hook, explaining the use and needs for Hooks. This can be as simple as showing up a message when a page is created. The talk cover how the return values affect the execution of a hook, how to find the right information from docs/hooks.txt and the user of var_dump() to debug the working.
3.Use the MW extension EditNotify to explain the usage of hooks.

Requirements

Beginners interested to start with MediaWiki contribution.

Speaker bio

I am an open source contributor at Wikimedia Foundation for the past one year. As a part of Google Summer of Code 2016, I have developed an extension for MediaWiki. I am an active member of FOSS@Amrita community. I have given talk on ‘How to contibute to MediaWiki and basics of git’ at Fedora Users and Developers Conference held at Cambodia. I was also a part of MediaWikiToLearn conference at Amrita University.

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Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more