What is the safest way to remove a custom namespace after all its articles have been deleted? If we just remove it from $wgExtraNamespaces, there will still be database entries (e.g., in the archive table) that reference the old namespace number, and I don't know if this will cause problems or not.
The official documentation isn't much help: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces#Removing_custom...
In the worst case, we can rename the namespace to "OBSOLETE" and make it read-only, or play tricks with Apache redirects, etc., but I'd prefer something cleaner. Thanks.
DanB
Daniel Barrett wrote:
What is the safest way to remove a custom namespace after all its articles have been deleted? If we just remove it from $wgExtraNamespaces, there will still be database entries (e.g., in the archive table) that reference the old namespace number, and I don't know if this will cause problems or not.
The official documentation isn't much help: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces#Removing_custom...
In the worst case, we can rename the namespace to "OBSOLETE" and make it read-only, or play tricks with Apache redirects, etc., but I'd prefer something cleaner. Thanks.
DanB
It shouldn't matter having those inaccessible entries, but if it bothers you, you can change that namespace number for the name of another, exisisting one.
Daniel Barrett-3 wrote:
What is the safest way to remove a custom namespace after all its articles have been deleted? If we just remove it from $wgExtraNamespaces, there will still be database entries (e.g., in the archive table) that reference the old namespace number, and I don't know if this will cause problems or not.
Hi Dan,
I've been tinkering with changing namespaces lately, changing the numerical index for an existing namespace for avoiding conflict with namespaces used by certain extensions (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_namespace_registration ). I found the namespace implementation quite robust and haven't encountered any problems yet after the changes.
AFAIK the only place in the database where references to the namespace of a given page are stored is the respective field in the "page" table which you might even change directly.
hth Frank
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