Re: Wiki-To-Print Extension Nitpicks

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 9:39 AM, Heiko Hees <[email protected]> wrote:
> Andrew,
>
>> 1) The connection to PediaPress seems unreliable. Clicking "Order Book
>> from PediaPress" returns an error about as often as it succeeds. I
>> will try to record more data about this failure mode next time I see
>> it
>
> we are investigating but were unable to reproduce this. Do you
> remember whether the error message said something like "a timeout
> occurred" ?

I actually can't reproduce it anymore myself, so maybe it's fixed now.
Could have been server load problems on the WMF end, I know we had a
lot of that on tuesday. The error was a POST timeout error.

>> 4) In addition to the GFDL, I would like to be able to specify
>> additional boiler-plate preface and appendix text, such as an "About
>> Wikibooks" page that will be automatically included in all books
>> (perhaps as checkbox option, if some people don't want it). This way
>> when/if we start to distribute/sell these books, recipients will know
>> what the book is, where to find the electronic copy of it, how to edit
>> and improve it, etc. I'm working on a page now (at
>> [[Wikibooks:Collections Preface]]) that people can include manually
>> for now, but having to manually include this page in every collection
>> we make will be annoying.
>
> A possible solution would be to (automatically) start new collections
> based on a saved collections (as a template) which already includes
> this page. Users could remove or exchange the preface on the
> collection page if they have different preferences.

Automatically starting from a saved template somewhere would
definitely be awesome. That would allow us to specify all sorts of
local things (including a local copy of the GFDL, to fix the issue of
the bad shortcut) that authors could opt-out of on a per-case basis.
This would be a very very nice feature.

 free to report other bugs using this tracker or on the technical
> mailinglist for this project: http://groups.google.com/group/mwlib

I may very well have to join that list, because I'm going to generate
A LOT of feedback over time. Thanks!

--Andrew Whitworth