|
|
|
|
News
From OrganicDesign
(Redirected from Main Page)
17 June 2008
The Benefits of Subversion
We've recently started moving many of our extension code into the MediaWiki Subversion (SVN) repository so that their development can benefit from the input of all those working on the main code-base and other extension developers who take an interest.
This has already proved to be a very productive move, for example, the EmailArticle extension was moved across one month ago today and has already been internationalised and messages fully translated for 14 new languages; Arabic, Bulgarian, Esperanto, French, Galician, Luxembourgish, Malayalam, Marathi, Dutch, Norwegian, Occitan, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese!
| |
|
| 25 May 2008
CurrentPages Extension
The CurrentPages extension (code) is basically a hit counter recording the number of normal page views to each article. The difference between this extension and the normal popular pages special-page is that this only records the hits for the last 24 hours. It creates a new table called currentpages_hourlyviews in the wiki database to store the information in.
| |
|
| 22 May 2008
New skin for 2008
Today we've changed the skin from a WikiSkin based skin to a normal MediaWiki skin. If your skin is not showing up like the screenshot to the right, then set it to "OrganicDesign" in your preferences.
OrganicDesign has gone through a few other skins over the last few years which are shown below. Click on any of the images to see them at 1:1 resolution.
| |
|
| 18 May 2008
Integrating with MediaWiki SVN
We've recently started moving our most stable and popular extensions into the MediaWiki SVN repository, so that they can evolve through the collaboration of the main developers of the MediaWiki project. We've also started developing the main MediaWiki code-base to allow support for the SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server database engines. Below is a list of the extensions we've moved into SVN.
I was wondering how many of the SVN committers are active and how often, so I made a PERL script to read in all the commits (svn-report.pl) and another (svn-results.pl) to format the results into monthly totals as shown below. The core commits are those changes made to the MediaWiki code-base (the phase3 branch) rather than those made to other areas of the repository such as extension code. The resulting statistics are in the MediaWiki SVN Statistics article.
- See also
- SVN - local SVN article
- MW:Commit access - article about obtaining Commit access to the MediaWiki repository
- W:SVN - WIkipedia article about Subversion in general
| |
|
| 17 April 2008
TreeAndMenu extension
I've needed to create parser-functions a number of times which allow the rendering of dynamic menu's. Each time I've created a specific extension for the job and have used code from TreeView to achieve it, so finally I bit the bullet and merged the best JavaScript dynamic menu I've found (Sons of Suckerfish) into the TreeView code base, and renamed the extension from TreeView5 to TreeAndMenu.
The TreeAndMenu extension allows bullet lists to be rendered as folder trees or dynamic drop-down menu's. It has been tested successfully on MediaWiki versions 1.6.10, 1.8.4, 1.9.3, 1.10.2, 1.11.0 and 1.12.0. And is known to work on Safari, IE6, IE7 and all Mozilla based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey.
Screenshot showing a tree on the left and a dynamic drop-down menu on the right
- See also
| |
|
| 16 May 2008
Predictable random number generator discovered in the Debian version of OpenSSL
A major security hole was announced on May 13, 2008 in the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) of the Debian version of OpenSSL, one of the most used cryptographic programming libraries. The problem affects all the Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions, like Ubuntu and Knoppix, that was used to create SSL/TLS keys since September 17, 2006. The bug was discovered by Luciano Bello, a Debian package maintainer. (read the rest on WikiNews...)
This bug affects Organic Design because our servers are Debian and workstations Ubuntu, but all have been updated now and the compromised keys regenerated. The problem affected the MediaWiki SVN users as well because it uses SSH keys for authentication, so anyone's keys that were generated on affected systems had to be replaced including ours.
| | 
|
| 9 May 2008
SQLite support moved into main codebase
SQLite database support is now maintained directly as part of the main MediaWiki code-base rather than as a separately installed extension.
| | 
|
| 30 April 2008
Crackbot Alert!
After reading this Analyzing Malicious SSH Login Attempts article I decided to do some checking of our own logs (on Debian /var/log/auth.log is the one showing SSH login information), and there are many bots attempting to access our server via SSH just as there were on the Honeypot discussed in the article. In fact we've had around two thousand login attempts per day for at least the last few months! It looks like we've not had any successful attempts thanks to being strict with strong passwords, but the article suggests some simple things which will prevent most attacks from succeeding.
- Always use strong passwords, don't assume that a normal word with a bit of leet in it is going to fool the crackbots!
- Ensure you have root login disabled as that is the most common account attempted by the crackbots. Always log in as a standard user then use su or sudo.
- Changing your SSH port to something other than 22 will put most bots off the scent since their resource is best spent trying logins on known SSH connections rather than port-scanning for others on non-standard ports.
- Disable access from all but users who really require it rather than the default which is to allow all users to shell in.
In addition to these things I also brought our server OS and software up to date which hadn't been done in quite a while, so many new security patches will have been applied during that process.
| | 
A real robot called CrackBot
|
| 3 March 2008
Treeview 5 released
Treeview 5.0 has been developed over the last few weeks by Sven. It was the same code as Nad's Treeview4 for handling the wikitext bullet structure and transcluded sub-tree's. But the JavaScript and main rendering code were rewritten to use the dTree JavaScript tree menu.
Treeview 5.0 has been updated to 5.1 by Nad over the last few days. The original Treeview4 code has been replaced because it used voodoo which failed in the new MediaWiki 1.12 version. The new code is much more robust and should be completely version independent.
For more information on the new Treeview 5.1.x, see MW:Extension:Treeview regarding installation and usage, or Extension talk:Treeview5.php for an explanation and details of the new code.
| |
|
| 29 February 2008
|
|
|
|
|
| 
