I have been requested to add some functionality to a Mediawiki page. I am learning MW as fast as I can. We have a MW page with a very large wikitable of bibliographic data. The data is also kept in an external Excel file. It has been requested to add an input field and button so that visitors can search that bibliography and redisplay just the rows that contain a match for the search. I've looked at a lot of extensions and have tried to work out how I could patch together this functionality (Maybe External Data and URLGetParameters but how to do the input field?) I've thought about using an Iframe for the whole thing, and simply do it in PHP using the external spreadsheet but then the information in the IFrame is not visible to the MediaWiki search, yes? Perhaps Javascript/JQuery but I haven't worked out how to execute that on a MW page yet. Does anyone know a proven path for doing this type of thing so I can possibly cut out some of the dead ends I am investigating?
Related
I have a webapp that let users place dots on sitemap and link them to images.
The web app uses Javascript, CSS, and HTML.
phase1
While the user is subscribed he uses a rich set of functionalities to:
add dots on the sitemap and link them to images
edit the dots: move, delete, link momultiple images etc ..
etc..
This is done via the website that hosts the webapp.
phase2
When the user ends the subscription, he gets a .zip file with the information that he created (sitemap, images, links between the sitemap and the images, etc..).
The user can then connect to the website that hosts the webapp, without signing in and get a subset of the functionalities (e.g. he can only click on the dots and see the linked images, but he can no longer edit the dots or add images).
I want to change phase2.
Instead of interacting with the webapp on the website, I want to "freeze" the webapp into a interactive-pdf, or h5p page that can be played independently without the webapp.
There are multiple reasons that motivate to do this:
the webapp is complex, so engaging with the webapp is prone to more errors.
If the small subset functionality of the final data, which boils down to showing the image when clicking on the hyperlink, can be done via h5p browsing, then the risks for runtime errors are greatly reduced.
the interactive-pdf or .h5p file can be browsed by variety of tools potentially even when being offline.
the end product can be re-designed to appear more simple.
My questions:
is it possible to programatically convert the Javascript, CSS, and HTML content into a interactive-pdf or .h5p page?
Every end-product will be different (e.g. by the number of dots, and their location in the sitemap) so having to manually create the .h5p page every time is not practical.
are there mobile apps (e.g. on Apple Store, or Google Play) that can read .h5p content locally, e.g. when the device is offline?
Thanks
EDIT:
Oliver Tacke, thank you for replying.
Up to few days ago, looking for a solution to my problem, I did not hear about h5p at all.
When looking into h5p, I see that
many comments rlated to h5p that is a bit old - from ~5/6 years ago.
h5p is frequently talked in context of education (e.g. Moodle)
when I filed the question I could not even find a tag for 'h5p'
I could not find forums for h5p in mainstream channels like Discourse or Slack
So I want to know if I'm in the right direction at all.
Is h5p a new thing that just takes time to pick up, or is it something that started a while ago and dwindlled down,
or maybe I'm wrong and it is currently more active than I think (I'm aware of h5p.org and I do see activity there).
Basically, I want to create interactive content that can work
ideally offline, or
online but with a mainstream browser/tool/website (i.e. without needing my special website)
In the design industry, I know there are interactive catalogues.
But I don't know if the user can download them and somehow (e.g. with an epub reader) read them.
Thanks
I don't know anything about creating PDFs programmatically, so I can only offer a partial answer for the H5P related part. Given the broad scope of your question, this may be acceptable as a comment.
H5P content follows a specification that is documented at https://h5p.org/documentation/developers/h5p-specification.
You would basically have to implement an H5P content type library (file) from the files that you are given by the service. I assume that the JavaScript and CSS files are always the same, then those could be reused directly (but potentially not legally). You would also have to add some more JavaScript that takes parameters and generates the HTML output that you get from the service. You would then have to model semantics.json to suit the parameters, and then you essentially have an H5P content type. You don't have to use the then available form based editor (which probably wouldn't make sense), but you could create the content.json file programmatically and put it into the H5P content file archive. To create that file programmatically, you'd have to create a converter that identities the parameters in the HTML file generated by that service and transform them into the H5P semantics/content format. Not sure if it made more sense to rather create an editor widget for H5P, so you wouldn't have to depend on the other service at all.
There are currently no known mobile apps that allow you to load and run H5P content. They are on the roadmap of the H5P core team, but I wouldn't expect them to work on those any time soon. There's the moodle app for the moodle LMS that allows to use H5P content offline, but it needs to be fetched from a moodle instance. There's Lumi that allows to run H5P content locally on Windows, MacOS and Linux, but not on Android or iOS. However, Lumi also allows to create single standalone HTML files from H5P content containing all the content and logic ready to play, so that would allow offline use on Android and iOS.
I'm using UIWebView to display data from my organization data (publicize and legal), however, for instance, I would only want to pull specific data from the html file rather than pulling the whole URL. e.g. I want to pull the "News" section of the html and I want the user to only stay in that page, not enabling them to go into other parts of the website (e.g. home page, contact us) and allowing them to view the PDF article on the HTML file.
I've asked around and read up on DOM and screen scraping, but it seem that the data pulled are stored in a database instead.
Is there any way that I can pull just the HTML "News" section with the PDF URL into my customized HTML file and that it will be updated live (maybe every 30second it will refresh and pull information from the website so that the content and list of PDF are up to date)(e.g. added in 3new article into the main website, my customize HTML file will also refresh and pull information from website and update my article list)
If anyone can point to me a specific method that allow HTML to HTML data passing (live), that will be great and I can go do more research on it. Currently very lost and confuse as it is my first time doing this. Any help/feedback will be very much appreciated :)
EDIT: For example, google map or google search. I don't want to use the whole google webpage, just taking the important thing that i want like the search result or map display.
This will involve quite a lot of learning on your part - you'll have to learn HTML / the DOM / JavaScript and iOS/UIWebVIew.
Lets leave the live refresh part for now, I'll post another answer or edit to that later on.
That's not going to easy either (check out my earlier posting today on background execution issues that will affect you, unless the update is only to take place in the foreground
iOS Run Code Once a Day)
You will have to do something like this. And note that I've never tried this, nor seen posting of people who have on here, but in theory it should work, but there will be a lot of learning as I've said, and lots of trial and error. Its a big task when you're not familiar with these things.
1) Download the html page and load it in a UIWebView, but that UIWebView is hidden so the user's can't see it.
2) When the page has loaded its dom will be accessable.
3) You can use Javascript to access the DOM and look for the parts you want.
How you inject and run the Javascript in UIWebView can be answered in a separate question (this answer will get too long if all the exact details are included).
4) Remove the parts of the dom you are not interested in. Or use use events to make only those parts you are interested in appear, jQuery can probably help here.
5) Display the UIWebView
Alternatively the HTML could be saved to a file and string parsing could be used to search for the bits you are looking for and create a new text html file from it. I think this would get very messy, better to take advantage of the fact that UIWebView will parse the HTML page and create the dom for you.
I happen to have inherited a drupal project where a common html validation error seems to occur on nearly every page. The validation error is so minor and easy, I actually only have to open any page up in the editor and the tinymce wysiwig editor will fix the problem automatically and I only need to save the page. Considering I will be needing to do this 30k+ times to apply it to the entire site, is there any way to have it either applied automatically to all pages or automated? Any and all suggestions welcome to help me speed up the process.
EDIT : Used solution
Since I'm not the most adept at finding a programming solution, I did find an addon for firefox letting me record et loop a series of actions called iMacros. Started it up in 5 different instances of FF and let it running all night and it's half done already. Certainly not the most efficient way of doing things, but may be a solution for those who, like me, aren't as advanced in programming.
Assuming you can loop through the pages somehow i would suggest to build a page where you include the code source into the editor root html element (textarea or whatever). Then after onInit (see the tinymce configuration options for this (setup parameter and onInit) ) you trigger the submit or save button which delivers the page to the server where it gets saved.
The pages textarea might then get filled with the code of the next page and so on...
The important part here is that your serverbackend is able to loop through the different pages and knows which page comes next when receiving the modified/corrected page code.
Is it possible to make JSON data readable by a Google spider?
Say for instance that I have a JSON feed that contains the data for an e-commerce site. This JSON data is used to populate a human-readable page in the users browser. (I.E. The translation from JSON data to human displayed page is done inside the users browser; not my choice, just what I've been given to work with, its an old legacy CGI application and not an actual server-side scripting language.)
My concern here is that, the google spiders will not be able to pickup/directly link to the item in question when a user clicks on it in google, being presented with an index page full of all the items, rather than being linked directly to the item they clicked on.
Is there anyway of "informing" the google spider in the JSON that what they should feed the user a different link?
While Google does crawl and index JavaScript in some circumstances, it's still best to serve "normal" (X)HTML content if at all possible. In this case, it would help to know the rest of the site's setup, in particular: is the JSON content just used to create a feed of links to the product pages (with static content) or are all product pages also generated by JSON feeds? If the feed is only used to point to the actual product pages (which are static) then one way to make the product pages discoverable could be to create a HTML sitemap page or some other alternate form of navigation. A XML Sitemap file can also help, but I would recommend not using it as the sole way of making the product pages discoverable.
If all of the content is only accessible through JSON feeds, then I think you will have to make some bigger changes if you want that content to be accessible through search results.
One way to handle it could also be to use the new JavaScript crawling/indexing proposal, which basically would result in a headless browser being set up between your site and Google: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/ (whether setting this up or revamping the rest of the site is easier is hard to say :-))
You should make a wrapper page in server-side code around the JSON data, and respond to requests with either the wrapper or the regular version depending on the User-Agent.
What I mean by autolinking is the process by which wiki links inlined in page content are generated into either a hyperlink to the page (if it does exist) or a create link (if the page doesn't exist).
With the parser I am using, this is a two step process - first, the page content is parsed and all of the links to wiki pages from the source markup are extracted. Then, I feed an array of the existing pages back to the parser, before the final HTML markup is generated.
What is the best way to handle this process? It seems as if I need to keep a cached list of every single page on the site, rather than having to extract the index of page titles each time. Or is it better to check each link separately to see if it exists? This might result in a lot of database lookups if the list wasn't cached. Would this still be viable for a larger wiki site with thousands of pages?
In my own wiki I check all the links (without caching), but my wiki is only used by a few people internally. You should benchmark stuff like this.
In my own wiki system my caching system is pretty simple - when the page is updated it checks links to make sure they are valid and applies the correct formatting/location for those that aren't. The cached page is saved as a HTML page in my cache root.
Pages that are marked as 'not created' during the page update are inserted into the a table of the database that holds the page and then a csv of pages that link to it.
When someone creates that page it initiates a scan to look through each linking page and re-caches the linking page with the correct link and formatting.
If you weren't interested in highlighting non-created pages however you could just have a checker to see if the page is created when you attempt to access it - and if not redirect to the creation page. Then just link to pages as normal in other articles.
I tried to do this once and it was a nightmare! My solution was a nasty loop in a SQL procedure, and I don't recommend it.
One thing that gave me trouble was deciding what link to use on a multi-word phrase. Say you had some text saying "I am using Stack Overflow" and your wiki had 3 pages called "stack", "overflow" and "stack overflow"....which part of your phrase gets linked to where? It will happen!
My idea would be to query the titles like SELECT title FROM articles and simply check if each wikilink is in that array of strings. If it is you link to the page, if not, you link to the create page.
In a personal project I made with Sinatra (link text) after I run the content through Markdown, I do a gsub to replace wiki words and other things (like [[Here is my link]] and whatnot) with proper links, on each checking if the page exists and linking to create or view depending.
It's not the best, but I didn't build this app with caching/speed in mind. It's a low resource simple wiki.
If speed was more important, you could wrap the app in something to cache it. For example, sinatra can be wrapped with the Rack caching.
Based on my experience developing Juli, which is an offline personal wiki with autolink, generating static HTML approach may fix your issue.
As you think, it takes long time to generate autolinked Wiki page. However, in generating static HTML situation, regenerating autolinked Wiki page happens only when a wikipage is newly added or deleted (in other words, it doesn't happen when updating wikipage) and the 'regenerating' can be done in background so that usually I don't matter how it take long time. User will see only the generated static HTML.