Hey everyone,
We don't have a {{USERNAME}} variable. It's been requested about 3 times, and each request has been rejected for a good reason; it would defeat page caching completely. This would not be helpful. Rob Church
With my level of technical knowledge, I'm not exactly sure why this would defeat page caching. Do you have a link or two to suggest so I would understand better what's at stake here.
I was really planning on relying heavily on this template for the design of the wiki I manage and I wouldn't want to hack something in that might cause more problems than it solves...
Thanks, Stéphane
On 04/02/06, Stéphane Thibault wrote:
Hey guys, here's what I'm trying to do.
I'm setting up a MediaWiki website for a scientific association and instead of relying only on collaborative writing, it's also important that members be allowed to write "signed" articles on a subject that may already exist.
What I'd like to do is include a string in the [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]] that would allow the user to create the desired article after a failed search, redirecting him to this page:
User:Username/Article
The original article page would then act as a disambiguation page listing all articles written on a particular topic.
It should be simple enough but I just can't find the proper variable to use for the username in my template. I looked at theses pages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words
but couldn't find what I'm looking for. Any hints? Is there a built in template maybe for "wgUser"? Or maybe even a simpler way to achieve this goal?
I originally posted my question over here if anyone's interested on this topic: http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=999
Thanks, Stéphane
MediaWiki can co-operate with external server-side caching mechanisms such as squid, etc. or maintain an internal parser cache of pages, which reduces the load on the server somewhat, given that the markup for a page no longer needs to be parsed upon each hit.
Introducing a variable like {{USERNAME}} would interfere with this mechanism to some extent. Having said that, I doubt even the senior developers can keep full track of what's cached when and where, so it's possible that I'm not quite correct in thinking this. However, evaluating the feature requests, and considering the caching to date, it makes sense to me that this would interfere with server-side caching.
All the above considered, if your wiki is a smaller one, it may be possible to hack in some workarounds and/or hack in this variable and disable the parser cache.
It's not *all* cut and dried. ;-)
Rob Church
On 06/02/06, Stéphane Thibault thibault.stephane@gmail.com wrote:
Hey everyone,
We don't have a {{USERNAME}} variable. It's been requested about 3 times, and each request has been rejected for a good reason; it would defeat page caching completely. This would not be helpful. Rob Church
With my level of technical knowledge, I'm not exactly sure why this would defeat page caching. Do you have a link or two to suggest so I would understand better what's at stake here.
I was really planning on relying heavily on this template for the design of the wiki I manage and I wouldn't want to hack something in that might cause more problems than it solves...
Thanks, Stéphane
On 04/02/06, Stéphane Thibault wrote:
Hey guys, here's what I'm trying to do.
I'm setting up a MediaWiki website for a scientific association and instead of relying only on collaborative writing, it's also important that members be allowed to write "signed" articles on a subject that may already exist.
What I'd like to do is include a string in the [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]] that would allow the user to create the desired article after a failed search, redirecting him to this page:
User:Username/Article
The original article page would then act as a disambiguation page listing all articles written on a particular topic.
It should be simple enough but I just can't find the proper variable to use for the username in my template. I looked at theses pages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words
but couldn't find what I'm looking for. Any hints? Is there a built in template maybe for "wgUser"? Or maybe even a simpler way to achieve this goal?
I originally posted my question over here if anyone's interested on this topic: http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=999
Thanks, Stéphane
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 06/02/06, Stéphane Thibault thibault.stephane@gmail.com wrote:
With my level of technical knowledge, I'm not exactly sure why this would defeat page caching. Do you have a link or two to suggest so I would understand better what's at stake here.
Basically, page caching means storing processed pages so that they can be served to multiple users without the extra processing required to recreate them from wikitext. If you get as many visitors as, say, Wikipedia, this amounts to a *huge* saving in the amount of servers you need to keep the site responsive.
If you had a {{USERNAME}} variable, no two users would ever see the same version of a page, so they couldn't be cached. (Obviously, the link to "User:..." at the top of the screen is generated each time anyway, but the *content* of the page can still be cached locally, and stuck inside the extra bits of skin)
As Rob says, though, if you're only running a small site, it may not be too much of a problem to disable the relevant levels of cache, letting each page be rendered fresh.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
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