[Textbook-l] Extension:AllBooks

[mike.lifeguard]

If you remember back in November we were asked what would be on a technical
wishlist for Wikibooks. One of the things we said[2] we wanted was a way to
list all books & enumerate them (all *books* as opposed to all pages). Ramac
and Pietrodn have been working on an extension[2] which does this.

 

Darklama and I have taken an initial look at things, and Simetrical found
one error that has been corrected. Anyone who is technically-minded is
invited to review & test the code. Everyone else is invited to discuss
improvements.

 

The extension is documented at mediawiki.org, but here's a quick overview
for the sake of convenience:

*Adds the {{NUMBEROFBOOKS}} variable

*Adds [[Special:AllBooks]], which lists all books in specified namespaces

*List books beginning at some prefix using ?offset=whatever

*The regex used to determine what is a book and what isn't is a system
message, so administrators may edit it, though the default should work for
most (all?) Wikibooks languages

 

After this much time with apparently no interest in developing anything for
Wikibooks it's exciting to finally see such active development on something
needed specifically for this project. Many thanks to Ramac and Pietrodn for
their work, and also those who have helped them along the way. Hopefully
this is the beginning of a trend, and more tools will be developed to
fulfill our wishlist!

 

-Mike.lifeguard

 

 

[1]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2007-November/001164.html

[2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AllBooks