TULIPS/2025-05-22

Welcome to our 33rd TULIPS (Thursday Updates & Logs Improving Platform Software)! You can read the previous one if you haven't yet.

These posts will be made whenever we have enough development updates to make a post, usually on Thursdays.

Live now

We have published a protection policy. TL;DR: wikis are collaborative projects, we don't host projects for a small group of people to have absolute control over and disallow anyone else from editing.

Improvements

• Administrators can now hide log entries and old revisions via Special:RevisionDelete.
• ThemeToggle no longer requires themes to be named light and dark for automatic detection (based on system preferences) to become available, as long as the themes are correctly tagged with kind=light/kind=dark.
• Adjusted ad placeholders to be slightly less obstructive.
• Gadgets now support section descriptions at Special:Preferences. These descriptions can be created at MediaWiki:Gadget-section-info-SECTIONNAMEHERE and display right under the section heading.

DLW 2.0

After being in testing for over a month, we are finally launching DLW 2.0! This version aims to merge the features of WDL and greatly expands the design variables to allow more customization in a standardized (and officially supported) way. We had to deviate a bit from the initial ethos of DLW being layout-minimal and focusing on colors, but we think the tradeoffs are worth it. There's not 100% feature parity, but we're not done improving and are investigating what else we can add now that this much is stable. Going forward, new wikis will start on this version.

Some features this new version adds:

• Greatly improved navigation tab customization.

  The vector gradient is still default, but there are variables for customizing this now if you want something more personalized.

• Built-in top-logo support.

  You no longer have to copy over MediaWiki:Gadget-topLogo.css, just change --wiki-is-top-logo from 0 to 1. (if you previously copied that gadget over, you should remove it if upgrading)

• Built-in fixed-width support.

  Like the top-logo, you no longer need MediaWiki:Gadget-viewportWidth.css, just set --wiki-page-content-max-width. (again, delete the old gadget if you have it and are updating DLW) We know some weirdos people like having the reduced width, and some very cool people hate it, so we're still investigating an approach that lets both groups have what they want.

• Improved fallbacks for older browsers.

  This was actually added a few weeks ago, but we wanted to let everyone know that the previous color-mix fallback strategy actually did not work. At all. The new one does, we promise. So wikis should be usable on Windows 7 again, with only some minor aesthetic issues.

• A lot of variables that are not changed 99% of the time have been moved to the bottom to try and make things less overwhelming. You can still change these if you want, but it's not something the average admin should be concerned with.

The new version also has some header text on vector.css explaining more about what's going on, how to add customizations, and how to opt-out of future dlw updates at the cost of taking on ALL responsibility for your CSS.

To upgrade your wiki to this new version, go to defaultloadout.wiki.gg and copy MediaWiki:Vector.css, MediaWiki:Gadgets/vectorScripts, and MediaWiki:Gadgets/vectorScripts/main.js, as well as MediaWiki:Common.css. common.css may be a bit tricky as the layout of the variables has been changed, so you'll have to copy your old values over one by one. We're investigating making a script that can handle this for easier upgrades.

Additional special page redirects

• Finding some special pages should be easier now. In particular, the following redirects exist (new since last time!):
  • Special:AllGlobalUsers will redirect you to the canonical page, Special:ListGlobalUsers
  • The following pages will ALL redirect you to the canonical page, Special:LinkSearch
    • Special:ExternalLinks
    • Special:ExternalLinksSearch
    • Special:SearchExternalLinks
    • Special:ListExternalLinks
    • Special:AllExternalLinks

Please let us know if we missed any that would be helpful!

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue in PageForms that resulted in certain characters being over-escaped.
• Fixed an issue in PageForms that resulted in an exception when using a delimiter with < or > on Special:RunQuery.
• Fixed an issue in PortableInfoboxes which could cause excessive database load.
• In the netbar, fixed a misaligned divider line before the user profile link.
• In the netbar, an extraneous divider line will no longer display when there's no need for it (due to, for example, the theme switcher being unavailable).

Infrastructure

We are working on some changes that should improve overall platform stability. As is the case any time we make a change to our infrastructure, please let us know ASAP if you experience any problems or notice that things are slower than they used to be!

Changes we are testing

• Users with unsaved edits that were caught by Special:EditRecovery will see a warning in the netbar; this experiment has been rolled out to TITANs and will be released to all users at a later date.

Known issues

• Due to a DOM change in Google search results, the wiki.gg redirect extension may not be redirecting your search results (though URLs should still get redirected). We will patch this, but we also recommend installing Indie Wiki Buddy (not affiliated with us or with indie.io in any way) in the meantime; that extension will redirect independent wikis as well as most wiki.gg forks.

WE DID THIS

• The Picayune Dreams Wiki has created a Dialogue portal as part of their ongoing lore project and also a set of demo pages as part of their demo project!