MobileFrontend
Mobile optimised frontend for MediaWiki
MobileFrontend Extension

The MobileFrontend extension adds a mobile view to your mediawiki instance.

Installation

See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend#Installation

Development

Directory structure

  • resources/: Files for PHP consumption.
  • src/: Files to be processed by Webpack.

Coding conventions

Please follow the coding conventions of MobileFrontend: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MobileFrontend/Coding_conventions

Git hooks

Git hooks are provided by default to assist with adhering to JavaScript code standards, optimizing PNG files, etc. Running these hooks requires node.js, NPM, and grunt.

Install like so: 

npm install

If you are not running Vagrant, be sure to set your MEDIAWIKI_URL env variable to your local index path, e.g. MEDIAWIKI_URL=http://localhost/index.php/

Committing

Commits are important as they give the reviewer more information to successfully review your code and find errors or potential problems you might not have thought of.

Commits are also useful when troubleshooting issues and refactoring. If it's not clear why a line of code is in the repository important bug fixes could be lost.

Commits should be as minor as possible. Please avoid removing unrelated console.log statements, fixing unrelated whitespace etc. do that in a separate commit which mentions the word cleanup.

First line commit should summarise the commit with bug it fixes if applicable. e.g. Fix problem with toggling see bug x.

Second line should be blank. Third line should go into detail where necessary providing links to blog posts/other bugs to provide more background. Mention the platforms/browsers the change is for where necessary, e.g.:

  • This is a problem on Android but not OSX, see http://<url></url> which explains problem in detail
  • This is a workaround for a known bug in opera mobile see http://<url></url>

Testing

Unit tests

To run the full test suite run: 

npm run precommit

To run only PHP tests: 

php ../../tests/phpunit/phpunit.php "tests/phpunit/"

To run only MobileFrontend JS tests: 

npm run test:unit

Releasing

A new version of MobileFrontend is released every two weeks following the Wikimedia release train if there are new changes.

MobileFrontend follows the version naming from MediaWiki.

Configuration options

MobileFrontend

The following configuration options will apply to all skins operating in useformat=mobile mode.

$wgMFEnableXAnalyticsLogging

Whether or not to enable the use of the X-Analytics HTTP response header. This header is used for analytics purposes.

See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Kraken/Data_Formats/X-Analytics

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFUsePreferredEditor

Use the user's preferred editor (i.e. visual editor or source editor) on first load. Uses the visualeditor-editor user option.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFEnableMobilePreferences

Enable mobile preferences in Special:Preferences (currently only accessible in desktop). Currently this allows users to disable many of mobile's special page optimisations.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFUseDesktopSpecialHistoryPage

Enables the desktop version of the history page if set to true. If set to false, the mobile version will be enabled but can still be overridden by the user's mobile preferences option.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    // Enable mobile version of history page for all users by default
    'base' => false,
    'beta' => false,
    'amc' => false,
    ]

$wgMFUseDesktopSpecialWatchlistPage

Enables the desktop version of the watchlist page if set to true. If set to false, the mobile version will be enabled but can still be overridden by the user's mobile preferences option.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    'base' => false,
    'beta' => false,
    // Enable desktop version of watchlist page when AMC is enabled
    'amc' => true,
    ]

$wgMFUseDesktopContributionsPage

Enables the desktop version of the contributions page if set to true. If set to false, the mobile version will be enabled but can still be overridden by the user's mobile preferences option.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    'base' => false,
    'beta' => false,
    // Enable desktop version of watchlist page when AMC is enabled
    'amc' => true,
    ]

$wgMFEnableJSConsoleRecruitment

Controls whether a message should be logged to the console to attempt to recruit volunteers.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFIsBannerEnabled

Whether or not the banner experiment is enabled.

See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Features/Article_lead_image

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

MFScriptPath

When set will override the default search script path e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w will route queries (e.g. API) to English Wikipedia.

Note, this will make the wiki read only. Non-anonymous HTTP requests will throw CORS error. This may also cause compatibility problems with other extensions. This should not be used in production, it is strictly for development purposes.

  • Type: string
  • Default: ''

$wgMFMobileFormatterOptions

This provides options for the MobileFormatter.

  • headings: is a list of html tags, that could be recognized as the first heading of a page. This is an interim solution to fix Bug T110436 and shouldn't be used, if you don't know, what you do. Moreover, this configuration variable will be removed in the near future (hopefully).
  • maxImages - if a page has more than this number of image tags then the formatter will not run
  • maxHeadings - if a page has more than this number of heading tags then the formatter will not run
  • excludeNamespaces - disable the MobileFormatter for these namespaces. Article HTML for mobile will be the same as desktop.
  • Type: Object
  • Default: ‘{ headings: ['h1’, 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6'], maxImages: 1000, maxHeadings: 4000 }`

$wgMFSiteStylesRenderBlocking

If set to true, styles inside MediaWiki:Mobile.css will become render blocking.

This is intended for situations where the TemplateStyles extension cannot be used. When enabled, this may increase the time it takes for the mobile site to render, depending on how large MediaWiki:Mobile.css is for your wiki.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFTrackBlockNotices

If set to true, block notices will be tracked on display, along with some limited user interactions. Counts will be stored for later analysis. No personal data will be collected.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFMobileHeader

Requests containing header with this name will be considered as coming from mobile devices.

  • Type: String
  • Default: ‘'X-Subdomain’`

$wgMFRemovableClasses

Make the classes, tags and ids stripped from page content configurable. Each item will be stripped from the page.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    // These rules will be used for all transformations in the beta channel of the site
    'beta' => [],
    // These rules will be used for all transformations
    'base' => [],
    ]

$wgMFLazyLoadImages

Do load images in pages lazily. Currently it doesn't affect HTML-only clients (only JS capable ones) and it lazy loads images when they come close to the viewport.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    // These will enable lazy loading images in beta mode
    'beta' => true,
    // These will enable lazy loading images in all modes
    'base' => true,
    ]

$wgMFNearbyRange

The range in meters that should be searched to find nearby pages on Special:Nearby (defaults to 10km).

  • Type: Integer
  • Default: 10000

$wgMFNearby

Whether geodata related functionality should be enabled.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFSearchAPIParams

Define a set of params that should be passed in every gateway query.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    // See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T115646
    'ppprop' => 'displaytitle',
    ]

$wgMFQueryPropModules

Define a set of page props that should be associated with requests for pages via the API.

  • Type: Array
  • Default: ‘['pageprops’]`

$wgMFRSSFeedLink

Sets RSS feed <link> being outputted or not while on mobile version.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFSearchGenerator

Define the generator that should be used for mobile search.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    'name' => 'prefixsearch',
    'prefix' => 'ps',
    ]

$wgMFMinCachedPageSize

Pages with smaller parsed HTML size are not cached. Set to 0 to cache everything or to some large value to disable caching completely.

  • Type: Integer
  • Default: 64 * 1024

$wgMFAutodetectMobileView

Set this to true to automatically show mobile view depending on people's user-agent.

WARNING: Make sure that your caching infrastructure is configured appropriately, to avoid people receiving cached versions of pages intended for someone else's devices.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

$wgMFVaryOnUA

Set this to true, if you want to send User-Agent in the Vary header. This could improve your SEO ranking.

WARNING: You should set this to true only, if you know what you're doing!

CAUTION: Setting this to true in combination with a (frontend)caching layer (such as Varnish) can have a huge impact on how your caching works, as it now caches every single page multiple times for any possible/different User Agent string!

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFShowMobileViewToTablets

Controls whether tablets should be shown the mobile site. Works only if $wgMFAutodetectMobileView is true.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

$wgMobileUrlTemplate

Template for mobile URLs.

This will be used to transcode regular URLs into mobile URLs for the mobile view.

It's possible to specify the mobileness of the URL in the host portion of the URL.

You can either statically or dynamically create the host-portion of your mobile URL. To statically create it, just set $wgMobileUrlTemplate to the static hostname. For example:

$wgMobileUrlTemplate = "mobile.mydomain.com";

Alternatively, the host definition can include placeholders for different parts of the host section of a URL. The placeholders are denoted by h and followed with a digit that maps to the position of a host-part of the original, non-mobile URL. Take the host en.wikipedia.org for example. h0 maps to en, h1 maps to wikipedia, and h2 maps to org. So, if you wanted a mobile URL scheme that turned en.wikipedia.org into en.m.wikipedia.org, your URL template would look like: 

%h0.m.%h1.%h2
  • Type: String
  • Default: ‘’'`

$wgMobileFrontendFormatCookieExpiry

The number of seconds the useformat cookie should be valid.

The useformat cookie gets set when a user manually elects to view either the mobile or desktop view of the site.

If this value is not set, it will default to $wgCookieExpiration

  • Type: Integer|null
  • Default: null

$wgMFNoindexPages

Set to false to allow search engines to index your mobile pages. So far, Google seems to mix mobile and non-mobile pages in its search results, creating confusion.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

$wgMFStopRedirectCookieHost

Set the domain of the stopMobileRedirect cookie.

If this value is not set, it will default to the top domain of the host name (e.g. en.wikipedia.org = .wikipedia.org)

If you want to set this to a top domain (to cover all subdomains), be sure to include the preceding . (e.g. yes: .wikipedia.org, no: wikipedia.org)

  • Type: String|null
  • Default: null

$wgMFEnableBeta

Whether beta mode is enabled.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

$wgMFAdvancedMobileContributions

Whether Advanced mode is available for users.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFAmcOutreach

Whether the AMC Outreach feature is available for users.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFAmcOutreachMinEditCount

When Amc Outreach is enabled, this option sets the minimum number of edits a user must make before they are eligible to see the AMC Outreach feature.

  • Type: Number
  • Default: 100

MFBetaFeedbackLink

Link to feedback page for beta features. If false no feedback link will be shown.

  • Type: String|false
  • Default: false

$wgDefaultMobileSkin

The default skin for MobileFrontend.

  • Type: String
  • Default: ‘'minerva’`

$wgMFNamespacesWithoutCollapsibleSections

In which namespaces sections shouldn't be collapsed.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    // Authorship and licensing information should be visible initially
    NS_FILE,
    // Otherwise category contents will be hidden
    NS_CATEGORY,
    // Don't collapse various forms
    NS_SPECIAL,
    // Just don't
    NS_MEDIA,
    ]

$wgMFCollapseSectionsByDefault

Controls whether to collapse sections by default.

Leave at default true for "encyclopedia style", where the section 0 lead text will always be visible and subsequent sections may be collapsed by default.

In tablet sections will always be expanded by default regardless of this setting.

Set to false for "dictionary style", sections are not collapsed.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

$wgMFUseWikibase

If set to true, the use Wikibase is enabled and associated features is enabled. See $wgMFDisplayWikibaseDescriptions

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: false

$wgMFEnableWikidataDescriptions

If set to true, wikidata descriptions as defined in $wgMFDisplayWikibaseDescriptions will show up in the UI in the environment they have been told to target.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    'beta' => true,
    'base' => false,
    ]

$wgMFDisplayWikibaseDescriptions

Set which features will use Wikibase descriptions, e.g.

$wgMFDisplayWikibaseDescriptions = [
'search' => true,
'nearby' => true,
'watchlist' => false,
'tagline' => true,
];
  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    'search' => false,
    'nearby' => false,
    'watchlist' => false,
    'tagline' => false,
    ]

$wgMFSpecialPageTaglines

Set taglines for special pages

$wgMFSpecialPageTaglines = [
"SpecialPageName" => "valid-message-key",
];
  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    "MobileOptions" => "mobile-frontend-settings-tagline"
    ]

$wgMFStripResponsiveImages

Whether to strip srcset attributes from all images on mobile renderings. This is a sort of brute-force bandwidth optimization at the cost of making images fuzzier on most devices.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true

$wgMFResponsiveImageWhitelist

Whitelist of source file mime types to retain srcset attributes on when using $wgMFStripResponsiveImages. Defaults to allow rasterized SVGs since they usually are diagrams that compress well and benefit from the higher resolution.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    "image/svg+xml",
    ]

$wgMFNamespacesWithLeadParagraphs

A list of namespace codes that have lead paragraphs. Lead paragraphs will be shown before infoboxes if $wgMFShowFirstParagraphBeforeInfobox is enabled.

  • Type: Array
  • Default:
    [
    0
    ]

$wgMFStopMobileRedirectCookieSecureValue

The default value of the 'secure' cookie parameter that controls MobileFrontend's mobile redirect behavior. This variable defaults to true to encourage the use of TLS on any servers hosting MediaWiki and to avoid the disclosure of minor user privacy issues regarding a user's mobile browsing preferences.

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: true