User:SPage (WMF)/old/Onboarding new Wikipedians-Engineering

Notes on early iteration of GettingStarted from December 2012.

Useful links

Notes

en:Special:GettingStarted presents the page, but also hooks successful account creation to:

change the title slightly
show w:MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg with Agora CSS
turn the "returnto" link into an Agora button
use HTML5 browser push state to change the URL shown from Special:Userlogin?type=signup&action=submit to Special:GettingStarted

UserLoginComplete

 array( &$user, &$injected_html ) );

this is where CentralAuth puts up its row of icons

BeforeWelcomeCreation

array( &$onboarding_msg, &$injected_html )

This is where extensions can supply a custom message; GettingStarted points to w:MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg.

Other hooks

Manual:Hooks/AddNewAccount

Other issues

Is there any interaction with the new account creation API from Tyler Romeo that Terry approved for core?

probably not.

The "return to [Page]" problem

If on account creation the user goes straight to GettingStarted , we want it to have a nice Agora button saying

[ No thanks, back to Page I was on before account creation]

But the current piece of HTML

<p id="mw-returnto">
  Return to
  [[Page I was on]].
 </p>

is generated by core code andinfo@wikimedia.org added to the page by Special:Userlogin. As the comment in E3Experiments/experiments/onboarding/welcomecreation.js notes:

This link is generated by OutputPage::addReturnTo() which hardcodes message 'returnto', which in English is "Return to $1."
Besides specials/Userlogin.php, addReturnTo() is also called by SpecialChangeEmail.php, SpecialMobileFeedback.php, SpecialEditWatchlist.php, FileDeleteForm.php, etc.

To get this to be a button in Special:GettingStarted

core code needs to supply the information to the redirect in query strings. It was already
Extension:Onboarding should implement a similar makeReturnButton , so that this could be offered to OutputPage as more of the site gets Agora-fied.
unlike addReturnTo(), the text around the link should be a passed-in message