UESPWiki:Archive/CP New Extension: Gadgets

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New Extension: Gadgets

What do people think about asking Daveh to install the Gadgets extension? It enables a lot of useful Javascript tools to be added through the Preferences link, including things like HotCat and WikiEd. There's a good list here and you can see more if you log in to Wikipedia and look on your Preferences - Gadgets tab. One thing it includes is automatic support for a "purge" tab, which more than one user has already added manually by editing their personal JS file.

Does anybody have any objections? rpeh •T•C•E• 18:37, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Great idea. It's easy enough to add javascript for advanced users but Gadgets makes it easy for everyone. ‒ Joram↝Talk 20:42, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

It's a nice thing, though not really essential, since you can just use importScript in your monobook.js. A word of warning though: each gadget is an extra http request, and an extra page request from the server. It can slow down your page loads dramatically if you activate a lot of gadgets. And by default MediaWiki doesn't support caching for raw page views, but I think your squid cache should fix that. -- Nx / talk 22:02, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be good, barring no extreme burden on the servers. But at the same time, it is rather simple to just add it to your monobook.js. I run wikiEd with Greasemonkey for FireFox, and it slows down the site a good amount when I use it (mainly the editing pages). It would vary with connections obviously, but I don't know if the serve can hold them all up. If it can, I am all for it. –Elliot ^talk 22:40, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

It's more noticeable on the users' side, I don't think it will have such a dramatic impact on the server. WikEd is a slow beast though, and sometimes it reloads all the icons so you have to wait several seconds before you can edit. I only activate it when I need the regexp tool. -- Nx / talk 22:48, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

The majority of Gadgets' content is in Javascript, so although there will be a small increase in bandwidth (really, really small) the main delay you will experience is browser-based. If you take a look at the .js files that do the real work in the extension, they're all fairly small (2K max) so server load really isn't a factor. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:10, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

It's not just the slowdown in your browser caused by the javascript executing (usually modern browsers can handle it, except when there's a really large page and the gadget does something to the page text, like this one), the more significant slowdown is caused by the large number of requests (this isn't just a mediawiki problem). It doesn't matter if the individual gadgets are small. Bandwidth isn't a problem, latency is. -- Nx / talk 17:43, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Though I'll admit absolutely zero knowledge about the technical aspects of it, "Gadgets" are a feature I'd be happy to see available here. --GK^talk2me 18:40, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Done, but...: I've installed it and the test clock gadget I added works fine on content3 but not content1/2. I assume the issue is with the memcached since that is about the only difference. I'm going to make a few other changes and reset memcached and see if that fixes it. -- Daveh 02:39, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, reseting memcached seems to have cleared the issues. Note that I have installed the clock gadget for testing but feel free to remove it. -- Daveh 03:04, 21 February 2010 (UTC)