Thursday, February 28, 2008

Testing the new MySQL Forge


As Jay just just announced, we are launching Forge 2.0. This is a one man show, and that man is Jay. He designed and implemented the new Forge (and the old one, for that matter) almost entirely on his own. He fixed countless bugs, and after much suffering the community can now experience the new look and feel and the new cool features.
Thanks, Jay!

Now, if you want to help, enjoy the new Forge and report problems in our bugs system. Let me show you the general picture first,a nd then we'll see what to test.

A quick tour

There are many new features in the Forge:

  • The login. In the old Forge, you had two logins, one for the main forge and one for the wiki. In the new one there is only one login. If you had an account, use your email address and the wiki password to access the Forge.
  • The people section gives information on the user, and a summary of his/her contributions;
  • All sections can get votes. You can enter a vote from 1 to five for any project, tool, worklog.
  • The old snippets section is now called tools and code, to better describe what it contains. The code supports more languages than before (86 of them, actually!).
  • Comments. You can comment on any object (project, tool, worklog), using some HTML and special code tags.
  • The wiki is fully integrated, with the same look and feel, and a shared toolbar.



(Actually, I made a mistake in the example shown in this picture. I should have written "<b>bold</b> text" but you got the idea)

A testing check list


The new Forge has passed many checks, but we are sure that we must have missed something. And we know about some known bugs that we have not had time to fix, but we will tackle soon. Your help is much appreciated. If you have experience with MediaWiki and want to share your experience in fixing similar problems, by all means drop me or Jay a line, and we will be grateful.
Everyone else, you can just go through the list below, and report bugs to bugs system (Category: MySQL Forge).
  • Log in
  • edit an existing project (if you have created one before)
  • edit an existing tool (again, if you have created one before)
  • add a tag to a worklog/project/tool/person
  • search by tag
  • add a comment, using HTML or code tags
  • vote for a project/tool/worklog
  • add a new project and add tags
  • add a new tool and add tags
  • switch to the wiki, search for pages that you know in the old wiki, check that they are correct;
  • edit a wiki page
  • create a new wiki page
  • create a new user, login with this new entity, and do all the above
If that does not look enough to you, run around, and try to break things. Don't worry. We'll reload the database and fix the contents if you mess up too much.
However, remember that this is still a test environment. Everything you do will be overwritten on Monday, when we put the new Forge in production. Thus, play with it, but save important contents in the old wiki.

Troubleshooting


If your login does not work, remove all cookies related to forge1.mysql.com or forge.mysql.com and try again.
Remember that the new Forge uses the email address and the password of the old Forge wiki, not the main Forge.
One possible source of problems is when you had a different email address in the main forge and in the wiki. If that happened, we will be able to assign you ownership of the wiki pages you wrote, but not the projects and snippets. To fix that, go back to the old Forge and make sure that the email address used to login to the main forge matches the one used in the wiki, When we reload the database on Monday your previous work will be recognized. In the meantime, just create a fake account in the test forge, and enjoy the features!

No comments: