PHP

Wikibase Phrase Entity, Viewing

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This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

In my previous post, we got to the point of being able to create a new Wikibase Entity, it is stored in the MediaWiki database as a page, however we can’t actually view it via any interface currently.

In this post, we will work through another set of code changes, tackling each issue as we see it arise, until we can see the entity represented in the various places that users might expect.

Viewing the page

The provided entity serialization is neither legacy nor current

When clicking on one of the links on Special:RecentChanges to a phrase page that we have created, we get our first error.

/wiki/Phrase:Phrase66900b01937842.29097733 MWContentSerializationException: The provided entity serialization is neither legacy nor current
from /var/www/html/w/extensions/Wikibase/lib/includes/Store/EntityContentDataCodec.php(253)Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The full stack trace is a little large, but you can find it in a paste bin.

This error is very similar to an issue we saw in the creation blog post, but this time the codec class can not deserialize what we have stored in the database, as we have not registered a deserializer for phrases.

Adding a deserializer to the entity registration file is very simple:

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Wikibase Phrase Entity, Creation

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This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

Finally, after a long lead up of discussing what an entity is, looking at some examples of entity extensions, and one extension that chose not to make use of the Wikibase Entity system & EntityDocument. What does it take to create a new type of data entity within Wikibase that implements the EntityDocument interface and makes use of the various integrations that have evolved over the past 10+ years?

I slapped together a very rough branch exploring this in 2022, but it’s hard to follow at best, and doesn’t really discuss any of the challenges that crop up along the way. This post, and those following are the redo, with much more context. And with any luck, it will work mostly as before (as Wikibase hasn’t changed much internally when it comes to how Entities are handled in the last 2 years)

If you want to follow along, you’ll need a development environment, and for that I would recommend the mwcli walkthrough that I wrote in the past weeks.

Where to start

I have a slight advantage here, as the closest thing that comes to documentation around how to add a new entity type to Wikibase is the documentation of the various fields that make up the entity registration system.

Beyond that, your only way in would likely be to start looking at one of the extensions that already provides an additional entity type, such as WikibaseMediaInfo, and the entity type registration that it makes. But each of these extensions come with their own complexity to muddle your view.

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A PHP library for jsonstorage.net

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I first heard about jsonstorage.net when searching around for a quick place to persist some data while writing a Twitter bot.

jsonstorage.net provides a simple JSON storage, with a free tier that can be very useful for small personal projects. The REST API is super simple, GET POST PUT DELETE etc. You can have either public or private JSON objects.

During my first use of this service, I remember writing some random code in PHP to interact with the service and deal with authentication. I remember thinking it would be nice if there were a small library that I could grab off the shelf for this, and it would have saved me some minutes… Today is the day I write that simple library!

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addwiki php libraries 3.0.0

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Back in 2014 I wrote a small collection of PHP libraries, releasing 2.0.0 of the base library in 2015 for interacting with MediaWiki and Wikibase. My goal back then was to create a stable base that PHP bot frameworks could be built on, while also experimenting with some framework like features in surrounding libraries.

And now, version 3.0.0 has been released, with a couple of new features, such as OAuth authentication, and lots of refactoring to make the libraries easier to work with and contribute to.

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VSCode & PHP XDebug from Localhost, WSL2 and Docker containers

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VSCode seems to be one of the up and coming IDEs over the last year. I personally switched from Jetbrains IDEs to VSCode fo most of my development work at some point in 2020.

Apparently up until now I have avoided running the PHP debugger Xdebug. I had to do a little search around to figure out the correct settings for my setup decided to write them down in this handy blog post.

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PHP 7 composer docker image digest

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At some point in the last weeks the composer docker image that can be found on docker hub switched from PHP7 to PHP8. Some projects, such as wikibase-docker, still require PHP7 for installation.

It looks like the composer image is not going to be providing an additional tag using a pre PHP 8 version, thus an old digest will be needed.

tldr; here is the digest that you want for composer with PHP7 (tag-details)

docker pull composer@sha256:d374b2e1f715621e9d9929575d6b35b11cf4a6dc237d4a08f2e6d1611f534675

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mediawiki-docker-dev v1 rewrite

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Back in 2017 at the Wikimedia Hackathon, I played around with Docker and docker-compose in relation to MediaWiki and testing with multiple setups at once while developing, meaning multiple PHP versions, web servers and databases. My original slides can still be found here.

Since then mediawiki-docker-dev evolved into less of a testing system and more of a development environment, allowing the use of a master replica DB setup, easily swappable PHP versions, debugging and more. The project on GitHub currently has 40 stars, 38 forks and has seen 17 people contributing back.

Over the past couple of years, developer productivity and development environments have been a big discussion area. The Wikimedia technical conference in 2019 had the main topic of Developer Productivity. There have also been a few efforts in a few directions trying to figure out what is best for the majority of people. These include local-charts (Kubernetes based environment) and MediaWiki-Docker (simple docker-compose based environment).

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sMite

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sMite stands for ‘simple Mite’, which to most people still means nothing at all. Mite is a time tracking web service, and depending on how companies make use of it things can become more complicated than they should be.
smite is how I tried to tackle this complexity in less than 8 hours!

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My Joomla Component development workflow

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Joomla20Symbol20Color20FLATMy first and currently only Joomla component development was for the SWA UK website. The component manages memberships, events, tickets, results and more and is a rewrite of a previous component for Joomla 1.

But in this post lets ignore what the component does and instead concentrate the development workflow that is used. After lots of research at the beginning of development I decided to ignore other  methods of developing a component and this is what I ended up coming up with.

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