RationalWiki talk:RationalWiki Foundation/2012 07 06 minutes

Developer accounts

Why? You need a mobile version of the site, not mobile apps, and you don't need developer accounts for that. An account on Google Play requires a one-time registration fee of $25. The Apple Store on the other hand is $99/year. What are these mobile apps you plan on distributing? -- Nx / talk 00:17, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

We would very much like to have a mobile version of the site, but I for one do not possess the necessary MediaWiki skills. ListenerX^TalkerX 03:48, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

A mobile version of the site a la Wikipedia's wouldn't be too hard, and would just require someone to make a mobile skin and put a switch somewhere in index.php (I'm not familiar with MediaWiki, though, so it might go somewhere else).

Mobile apps would be infinitely more useful if used to enable editing, not just reading, which you can do well enough with a mobile version in a browser. Blue (is useful) 04:18, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I thought we had discussed this in the past and determined that a mobile skin was very difficult to put together. ListenerX^TalkerX 05:59, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

You don't need mobile apps for editing either. You could write a web app, or just a gadget that enhances editing on the site using javascript. But in the end you'll still have a ton of text that you have to wade into, so no matter what you do, it'll never be easy to edit on a phone. Liquidthreads helps a lot for talkpages however. -- Nx / talk 06:10, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

The developer account wouldn't necessarily be just for Lx's project. 06:19, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Nor would it particularly be for just RationalWiki proper. The Noisy Orchestra ^{Oi! Oi! Oi!} 14:05, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

So, what kind of mobile apps? -- Nx / talk 20:26, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't Wikipedia have a mobile skin? I don't know how skins work, but it seems whatever software/extension, isn't the problem. But I also concur with Nutty: RWF is more than just the wiki. sterile^{sporadic heavy hitter} 16:55, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

This looks like it. I thought it was built into previous versions of Mediawiki but apparently some were reporting that it was broken even in the public release. 17:12, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

That just selects a different skin for mobile devices. It's not actually a mobile skin. Wikipedia's mobile website used to use a completely different frontend written in Ruby (i.e. it wasn't mediawiki, it only accessed the same database), but apparently they've rewritten that as an extension now. Here it is. Though it probably won't work on RW's outdated version of MW and the custom extensions will probably cause problems. -- Nx / talk 20:26, 10 July 2012 (UTC)