KB wiki supplement/replacement?

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Expand view Topic review: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by morat » September 24th, 2020, 7:34 am

UserChrome.css page edits:

* Top section

As of Firefox 69, Firefox ESR 68, Thunderbird 68, you must set the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference to true in about:config in order to load the userChrome.css file.

* Troubleshooting section

Check if the userChrome.css file is really in the chrome folder in the correct profile folder.

Menu Bar > Help > Troubleshooting Information > Update Folder > Open Folder
Menu Bar > Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Folder > Open Folder (click here)

The userChrome.css file name is case sensitive. Windows hides file extensions by default. Novice users may end up mistakingly naming the file userChrome.css.txt without realizing it.

Also make sure that file is a plain text file without formatting or a BOM (byte order mark). You can open the file in a Firefox tab as a test.

You can create the plain text file with Microsoft Notepad using ANSI encoding.

Try testing another rule to see if the userChrome.css file is working correctly.

Code: Select all

* { background-color: orange !important; }
It may be that a syntax error earlier in the file is preventing the rule from being parsed.

Remember you must restart the application for the changes to take effect.

* External links section

http://www.userchrome.org/
http://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefo ... y-default/

UserContent.css page edits: same as above except replace userChrome.css with userContent.css

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by morat » September 23rd, 2020, 6:54 pm

Thanks for reply. I will post the changes I would like on the user*.css pages when I get a chance.

userChrome.css
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css
http://mzlazine.miraheze.org/wiki/UserChrome.css

userContent.css
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css
http://mzlazine.miraheze.org/wiki/UserContent.css

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by tanstaafl » September 22nd, 2020, 6:34 pm

Its not possible to update the existing KB article because the wiki is locked and the administrator has disappeared for over a year. I've ported both user*.css articles to the new wiki but haven't finished updating them as I'm unhappy with the way they're not integrated with the next steps somebody would take.

They do already mention the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets setting. I'll try to merge information from https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-u ... e-css.html but customize it for Thunderbird and Windows 10.

Can you elaborate on what other changes you'd like?

I got distracted by family issues for a couple of months but have resumed work on the new wiki. I can port an article pretty quickly now, most of my time is spent trying to clean up and update the KB articles I want to keep.

I had originally tried to keep the existing categories but decided to simplify things since I'd prefer to keep us to about 60 articles (for Thunderbird). I'd like to leverage existing SUMO KB articles a lot, especially when they're basically used for reference rather than solving a problem. I want to have our own version of some heavily used articles (we have different target audiences) but focus mainly on subjects SUMO doesn't want to cover, cases where a more detailed or more technical writeup would be useful, or we don't agree with the party line.

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by morat » September 22nd, 2020, 7:14 am

I would like someone to update the kb userChrome.css article with info on the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets pref.

I like to add the kb userChrome.css link when I post a style. I could add the jscher2000 userChrome.css link instead, but that page doesn't explain how to toggle the pref in Thunderbird.

userChrome.css
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css

How to create a userChrome.css file (for Firefox)
http://www.userchrome.org/how-create-us ... e-css.html

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by tanstaafl » June 17th, 2020, 10:13 am

I'm finally getting around to starting to port the Thunderbird KB articles. When I have enough ported and updated to be useful I'll create a thread in Thunderbird General announcing that, and also mention it in the sticky "Is Thunderbird dead and other FAQ" thread. These are notes to myself which somebody else might find useful if they do something similar.

Sample command line from powershell window:

pandoc -f html -t mediawiki "64 bit builds.html" >"64 bit builds.wiki"

Create a https://mzlazine.miraheze.org/wiki/64_bit_builds web page and paste the contents of "64 bit builds.wiki" in it. Then

Delete the masthead div (otherwise you get MozillaZine as the first section)

Pandoc seems to create a section named after the KB article, as the first section. Delete it to avoid duplicating the title.

Delete all indexs, such as [[[index.php?title=64_bit_builds&action=edit&section=6|edit]]]

Delete the footer div at the bottom. For example

This page was last modified 21:00, 2 June 2019. This page has been accessed 159,792 times. About MozillaZine Knowledge Base - Disclaimers
MozillaZine and the MozillaZine Logo Copyright © 1998-2019 MozillaZine. All Rights Reserved - Privacy Policy

I'm leaving many of the rest of the div and span statements alone for the moment as they don't seem to cause any harm. Long term they should be deleted to make it easier to edit the markup (less visual clutter). Our mediawiki doesn't support them but if we ever backport the articles I assume that will be after the mediawiki software is updated.

The wiki uses :Category instead of Category and doesn't add a Categories: prefix. I replaced

[[Category:Thunderbird|Thunderbird]] [[Category:SeaMonkey|SeaMonkey]] with Categories:[[:Category:Thunderbird | Thunderbird]] for example

Quotes are remapped to HTML by pandoc. "supposedly" becomes "supposedly" for example

It also remaps some words with apostrophes. For example doesn't becomes doesnΓÇÖt , which you have to manually fix.

You need to add class="wikitable" to each table to have basic styling. It used to occur by default.

Indenting a ordered list by using multiple '*' characters as described in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Lists doesn't seem to work. It doesn't indent and displays multiple '*' characters with embedded spaces. Using one or more ':' characters for the indented entry instead seems the best workaround, though that omits displaying a '*'.

It seems easiest to add categories by tagging them in the wiki page, and after saving the page click on the Category link, and save it as a empty page.

In general, pandoc seems to work well. I was most worried about the mail and news settings article due to its very large size and heavy use of tables but it wasn't a problem.

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by tanstaafl » February 9th, 2020, 6:04 pm

I created the wiki and started to migrate a article and realized I had overlooked something critical. I was editing HTML for a table, not wiki markup. I had been thinking in terms of copying the source for an existing article to the new wiki, and editing it. I had been mainly worried about backwards compatibility. However, I only have access to the HTML created by the server processing the wiki markup. I forgot that when kerz put the KB in read-only mode he also disabled the side panel (which I need to view the source). Oops. Embarrassing.

MediaWiki supports extensions. There is a Html2Wiki extension that can be used to import HTML content (including images) into your wiki. However, "Only someone with administration access to the filesystem (and often the database too) on a server can install extensions for MediaWiki, but anyone can check which extensions are active on an instance of MediaWiki by accessing the Special:Version page". I only have rights for the wiki. Looking at Special:Version on the wiki I created it lists a good number of extensions but not that one.

In many cases its not that bad copying&pasting the text and adding the formatting again. But its a disaster for some articles such as mail and news settings. And the wasted time adds up quickly if I ever try to migrate a lot of the articles. https://openwetware.org/wiki/Converting ... iki_markup has a link to a demo for Pandoc, a tool to convert HTML to many different markup formats. I tried that with http://kb.mozillazine.org/Not_an_IMAP4_server . Not bad, but the demo is too crippled, it loses all of the source after the first paragraph. There is a version for Windows which I'll try. OpenOffice supports exporting a document as mediawiki so maybe I can use LibreOffice to convert HTML to mediawiki. Another possibility is to install html2wiki software (requires Perl so probably safest to do that under Linux) but it doesn't look like its been maintained for over a decade.

I'll start with Pandoc first.

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by malliz » February 4th, 2020, 12:21 am

Ok thank you tanstaafl

Re: KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by tanstaafl » February 3rd, 2020, 11:34 pm

I created an account at Miraheze and requested a MZLAZine wiki. That request has to be reviewed by a volunteer.

KB wiki supplement/replacement?

by tanstaafl » February 1st, 2020, 6:54 pm

A lot of the KB articles need updating and its not clear when kerz (the site admin) will be reachable. I'd like to copy some KB articles to some other MediaWiki based wiki and update them. I'm thinking of initially doing this just for a couple dozen Thunderbird articles, but might get more ambitious later on and update some Firefox KB articles too. I could create a post in the existing KB thread with a link to the new wiki.

I thought about trying to find some volunteers to help move and maintain the entire wiki but I don't think that is realistic. For several years I've been the only frequent KB contributor. Most of the other editors that were fairly active such as Alice Wyman seem to do that only for the SUMO Knowledge Base now. I want to maintain fairly technical KB articles such as mail and news settings and files and folders in the profile and opinion based articles such as Keep it working which would be unwelcome there. I want to stick with MediaWiki because I'd hoping that eventually I can move the updated KB articles back. I'm also hoping that when that occurs there might be renewed interest in maintaining the KB articles. Having a prominent "The End" thread doesn't exactly encourage people to help out :)

Suggestions on where/how to create this wiki? I'd prefer to use a existing MediaWiki service rather than install the software on a web host. If the entire wiki is not being migrated it doesn't seem to make sense to use a commercial service such as HostGator or MyWikis offer. I'm thinking of one of the following:

Miraheze (free, no ads, most servers in Netherlands but three in USA and one in Singapore)
ShoutWiki (free but has ads, servers in USA)

Does anybody have any experience with them?

http://gardener.shoutwiki.com/wiki/WikiGardener is an example of a wiki created at ShoutWiki. Notice the gardener prefix. I don't think I have the right to use MozillaZine as its name (even though I'm a MozillaZine KB admin creating a supplementary wiki for MozillaZine) so I'll have to use a slightly different name. Suggestions?

I re-read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Talk:Rules_an ... e_problems which talks about license issues. Both of those wikis state something like "Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported unless otherwise noted." which is compatible with both what we and SUMO use.

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