Team blog: Developers

We’ve added five new languages to the lib.reviews platform, thanks to the following translators:

• Bengali: Aftabuzzaman
• Spanish: Fitoschido, Koavf, and Macofe
• Macedonian: Bjankuloski06
• Swedish: WikiPhoenix and Ainali
• Simplified Chinese: Liuxinyu970226

Many thanks to all translators! Is your language still missing? Please help bring lib.reviews into more languages. Supporting all the world’s languages is one of the key ways open projects can set themselves apart. Follow the instructions in our previous blog post to get started on a new translation. If you’re not already a translatewiki.net contributor, getting started can be a bit bumpy, so let us know if you run into problems (find us on #lib.reviews on freenode.net; the translatewiki.net support channel is #mediawiki-i18n).

We can now connect lib.reviews review subject pages with items on Wikidata. This will make it easier, in future, for any application built on Wikidata to retrieve reviews associated with a Wikidata item.

Here’s an example Wikidata page for David Mitchell’s novel “The Bone Clocks”:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17512402

Note at the bottom of the page, there’s a section “Identifiers” which links to the lib.reviews page:
https://lib.reviews/thing/5d959136-380e-48ad-93e2-2db6bb081faa

This page has all reviews of “The Bone Clocks” (currently just one, feel free to add yours if you’ve read the novel ;-).

Thanks to User:Pizzaiolo for proposing the Wikidata property, which was enabled today. To use it on any Wikidata item, just add the following property to the item:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P3308

This is just a small first step towards integrating with Wikidata, but it is an important one.

A lot has happened since our August 2016 screencast: Atom feeds, teams, file uploads, new language versions, and more. So I just recorded a new screencast (YouTube version) that walks you through some of the recent changes. Share & enjoy ;-)

I don’t work off a script for these, but I prepare a few things that I want to show and pick the best of multiple takes. That means quality isn’t perfect, but it keeps the effort at 1-2 hours for a 10 minute screencast, so we can do an updated one every couple of months or so.

If you want to join lib.reviews development, you now have the option of using Vagrant to get a local development environment up and running. This is thanks to a pull request by Ori Livneh, who also pioneered the use of Vagrant at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Essentially, if you have a working installation of Vagrant and Virtualbox, getting a local install up and running is as simple as running the command vagrant up in a directory that contains a complete checkout of our GitHub repository. Give it a few minutes, and you’ll be able to access a fresh lib.reviews install locally at localhost:8080.

This is not necessarily much easier than following the installation instructions, especially if you’re familiar with Node.js and unfamiliar with Vagrant. The key benefit of using an environment like Vagrant is that the difficulty of getting a predictable local development environment up and running does not increase as the number of dependencies goes up. For example, if we end up adding an external message queue, or a search engine like ElasticSearch, Vagrant (if we update our configuration to reflect those additions) will install and configure those dependencies for you.

And although the environment is virtualized, the codebase is accessible from your host system, so you can use your favorite code editor without any performance penalty.

Thanks again to Ori for working on this change to make development more accessible!

Long before Slack, Skype, and Hipchat introduced real-time chat to countless work environments, IRC has been a part of the communications backbone of the Net, enabling people to share real-time news even of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the first Gulf War. It continues to be a popular tool for open source developers, and we use the #lib.reviews channel on irc.freenode.net (which you can access through Freenode’s web gateway if you don’t want to use an IRC client) for occasional real-time discussion.

Thanks to a pull request by Ori Livneh, lib.reviews now has its first IRC bot, ReviewBot. ReviewBot posts real-time notifications of reviews as they are posted to the site. This is accomplished through a webhook using the node-webhooks module. Basically, anytime a review is posted, we can queue up POST requests to a number of services to let them know a review is live. So, in future, we can use this same infrastructure to hook into other chat systems, or let apps that rely on our data know about relevant updates.

Thanks to the efforts of translators NMaia, Gomoko, Jean-Frédéric, Wladek92, and
Vitorvicentevalente, the first additional lib.reviews language editions are now online: Esperanto, French, Brazilian Portuguese, and European Portuguese. Use the selector at the bottom to change your language. We will assume that any content you create is in the language you’ve selected.

Translations in Bengali, Welsh, Spanish, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Russian, Swedish, and Simplified Chinese have started. Of those, Swedish, Chinese, and Macedonian are more than 50% complete. You can see the latest statistics here. See our previous post for details on how to start a new translation or help finish an existing one.

Thanks again to the amazing translatewiki.net community for making this happen!

From the beginning, one of the things that’s meant to set lib.reviews apart has been language support. Not only can you view the user interface in multiple languages, changing it also lets you write reviews in your language, or translate them. But I’m only bilingual, which is why we have only English and German so far.

You can change that now, by signing up for an account with translatewiki.net, the open source translation community behind the translation of the Wikipedia user interface. If you’re new to translatewiki.net, they ask you to make 20 test translations before they activate your account. This is to get quality translations and discourage spammers. I just timed it; it takes about 5 minutes, and you can use “Try another” to skip through a difficult message.

After your account is approved, visit this page and select your language in the top right to get started (see screenshot, language selector highlighted).

Run into any problems? Find us on #lib.reviews on irc.freenode.net or #mediawiki-i18n on irc.freenode.net for general issues with translatewiki.net, or tweet to us at @lib_reviews.

Technical background

I wanted us to be on translatewiki.net, because it’s both very successful and has a great existing translator community, and because it’s fully open source, unlike alternatives like Transifex. It’s a bit more DIY though, so we had to sort out some technical issues first. I submitted a couple of patches to the TranslateWiki platform to support the “.” in the project name, and to support the specific syntax for pluralization that our message format uses. These are now merged and the project is available for translation.

You can now see all reviews associated with a given team, and subscribe to them with an Atom feed reader.

Example:

• All reviews by the Edu-by-Video team
• Atom feed of all these reviews

Teams are central to lib.reviews – they will help us organize topics/groups. They won’t be the only mechanism for this, but they combine two important qualities – trust (a team can have its own rules of admission) and subject-matter (a review can be focused on a single topic of interest) – in ways that I think are appealing.

To start a new team or join existing ones, visit https://lib.reviews/teams . You need to be trusted (write a few reviews) to start new teams.

A few days in the making, you can now associate any review you write with any teams you’re a member of. This is a central idea of lib.reviews and it will take a while to get it right. Think of teams like sub-reddits or Facebook groups, places where people who care about the same thing can organize their work.

Next up, to make this more useful, you’ll be able to get Atom feeds as well and see the latest reviews on a team’s page.

If you’re a trusted user (which you should be if you’ve written a review or two), you can now upload image, sound and video files. To do so, visit a page about a review subject (the page you get when you click “More reviews and information”) and click the “Add media” button. You can add metadata for each upload, including a description and the license.

As with everything else, this is versioned data, and it can be translated, though this isn’t exposed through the user interface yet.

We don’t generate thumbnails yet, so if you want to embed images in reviews, it’s a very manual process for now. Once we create automatic thumbnails, you won’t have to worry about that part – we’ll just show whatever media you’ve uploaded alongside your review.

As always, please report any issues on GitHub.