Dear all,
I've installed MediaWiki and wish to render a navigation through the categories.
As a first simple experiment I tried to transclude the categories page into a template as described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Transclusion_costs_and_benefits
i.e I've got a template for a floatbox, and acccording to the description on the page above this code should work:
{| border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" width="40%" style="float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:0,5em; background:#f3f3f3;" |- |{{Spezial:Categories}} |}
unfortunately it doesn't work. It works with articlespace and other namspaces but not with the 'Spezial' or 'MediaWiki' namespaces.
Well in any case, this would just have been a hack - I might have also remodeled the categories page with a css stylsheet to shape it to my needs but there would be limits to that. For my purposes I' will have to generate a duplicate of the categories page with modified markup.
In the simplest case the navigation would render showing the categories. By mousing over those categories I would get a submenue showing all pages classified under that category.
* If I do opt for this simple scenario, Is there an easy way of modifying the output markup of the categories page?
The second scenario is clustering of categories: In classifying the Individual articles/pages I generally would wish to avoid use of subcategories and would rather prefer to use multiple categories for each page. I take those categories and pass them on to a clustering function to build a hierarchy. (my users are willing to do this classification à la del.icio.us)
In that case the questions are the following:
* how do I pull out the categories pass them on to a clustering function and pass the output as a new page with my own markup back to MediaWiki?
I plan to do the clustering as a MediaWiki extension. However Since I already have very good clusteringsoftware running on a different server, and am therefore also considering passing on the data to and fro.
* is there some standard way of passing on from and and pulling in Data back into Media Wiki applications?
I'd be glad if all or some of this has already been somebody else's' nightmare :)) if not, I would be glad for any hints or starting points.
Cheers from Cologne
Gustav Vella