On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:54 AM, Raffaele raffaelemac@tiscali.it wrote:
I think it is not very intuitive -- the real content should be in the main namespace.
Not necessarily. Content that is logically different and that you want to be distinguished technically should go in separate namespaces. For instance, mediawiki.org has most of its content in non-main namespaces, such as Manual:, Extension:, and Help:. In fact, enwikibooks already has a Cookbook namespace where a substantial amount of content resides. There's a concept of a "content namespace", so the pages could be made to behave much like the main namespace: counted as articles on Special:Statistics, searched by default, etc. If you preferred, you could have the books in a Book: namespace and the pages in the main namespace.
The point is, don't try writing an extension when reorganization would do the same thing to better effect, using already-existent core software features. I'm not a shell user, but if I were, I would reject any extension to this effect unless it were shown that suitable reorganization couldn't use built-in namespace features instead. The layout of the site should be determined by technical requirements where those have an effect on things. Deciding on how to organize the site without any consideration for how well that works with the software you're using, then trying to patch the software to match your preordained specifications, is not the sensible way to do things.
By the way, is there any developer who can help me? I have knowledge of PHP but i'm not a very great mediawiki developer. It would be better having some help by any expert developer, mostly for caching and other advanced stuff :-).
I'm a MediaWiki developer. I'm not a shell user and can't enable new extensions, but I can provide review and add things to Subversion. In this case I've given my review: I don't think the extension's concept is a good idea and I think it should be scrapped in favor of reorganization, and work on pagesinnamespace, if these features are desired.
The ones who could enable your extension are Brion Vibber or Tim Starling, either of whom may disagree with my opinion on this idea.