Kuma Report, February 2017
Here’s what happened in February in Kuma, the engine of MDN:
- Added Demo deployments in AWS
- Promoted the Sauce Labs partnership
- Packaged MDN data
- Shipped tweaks and fixes
Here’s the plan for March:
- Ship read-only maintenance mode
- Test examples at the top of reference pages
- Ship the sample database
Done in February
Demo Deployments in AWS
Thanks to metadave and escattone, MDN staff can now deploy demo servers to AWS. Bedrock has had this feature for a while, and it is extremely useful when demonstrating a change for manual or automated testing. It is also one step closer to MDN being hosted in AWS.
Sauce Labs Partnership
Sauce Labs provides a platform to test your website across many OS and browser combinations, so that you can automate testing and find issues before your users do. Mozilla is partnering with Sauce Labs to provide a free trial of the service. We’re promoting this offer on the home page and our introduction to automated testing. This required cross-team collaboration from Vik Iya, Kadir Topal, Rachel Wong, and Arcadio Lainez, and was implemented on MDN by jpetto.
Packaged MDN data
The writers have continued to work on extracting MDN data to GitHub.
The mdn/data repo has grown an excited
community who are impatient to
publish the data on npm.
Thanks to
Elchi3 and
iamstarkov, we have a
package.json file, and you can now
run npm install mdn/data. Further work is planned to publish on npm,
and to make this data (and the
Browser Compatibility data)
useful on MDN and in other projects.
Shipped Tweaks and Fixes
Other highlights from the 32 merged Kuma PRs in February:
- PR 4141: Fix capitalization for Articles in need of review page (Tckool’s first PR!).
- PR 4136: Remove TransactionTestCase, making tests twice as fast for local development (safwanrahman).
- PR 4057, PR 4067, PR 4080, and PR 4088: Improve the page editing experience with CKEditor updates and tweaks (a2sheppy).
- PR 4099: Remove Intern Tests, completing the transition to py.test for browser-based tests (stephaniehobson).
- PR 4125: Expand docs for the MDN CI pipeline (escattone). We now have a short, documented process for running integration tests during deployments.
- PR 4114: Move font-loading to client-side, improving performance and simplifying the backend (jpetto).
- PR 4103: Fix bugs with case-insensitive tags (jwhitlock).
KumaScript continues to be busy, with 19 merged PRs contributed by Elchi3, SebastianZ, SphinxKnight, a2sheppy, chrisdavidmills, and jpmedley. MDN staff and core volunteers are becoming more experienced with GitHub, and at fixing git issues over IRC.
Planned for March
We’re headed to sunny Toronto, Ontario for a Spring work week, where we’ll plan Q2 2017 and beyond. We also plan to ship some features in March:
Read-Only Maintenance Mode
jpetto and escattone have been working on Read-Only Maintenance Mode, a Kuma configuration that works against a recent database backup, displaying MDN data but not allowing login or page editing. We’ll work with jgmize and metadave to deploy this mode to AWS in March, eventually testing with live MDN traffic during off-peak hours.
Examples at the top of reference pages
In the next few months, we’re going to experiment with small, interactive examples at the top of high-traffic reference pages, and collect qualitative and quantitative data on visitor reactions. This includes an A/B test of the changes, using the Traffic Cop library that we introduced a few weeks ago.
Ship the Sample Database
The Sample Database has been promised every month since October 2016, and has slipped every month. We don’t want to break the tradition: the sample database will ship in March. See PR 4076 for the remaining tasks.