First of all, thanks for your replay and your suggestions.
CC'ing to Wikitech-l. Some more review:
- The way NUMBEROFBOOKS is calculated (scanning the page namespace) is
not acceptable, performance-wise. It needs to work like NUMBEROFPAGES, etc., with a site_stats row or similar.
OK, I'll learn how use caching :-D
- The allbooks-regex message might not be a great way of doing things:
** Since results will have to be stored in various ways, like the count being stored in site_stats, it's probably not feasible to change the regex used without running a maintenance script. A config option might therefore be better. ** Directly inputting the regex into a query is VERY VERY BAD! It's an immediate SQL injection attack. Also, it will cause the query to break in the presence of things like single quotes. Use Database::addQuotes() here.
Ok i'm going to correct it
- Generating AllBooks using a REGEXP query is . . . maybe not ideal,
altogether. Usually we have a flag in the table, for instance, page_is_redirect. It might be okay given that you'd "just" be scanning a few times as many rows, in the average case, and only for views of a certain special page. But a flag would be nice.
What do you mean? A "is_book" flag? I saw that exists the a kind of "is supbage" flag but unfortuately not every Wikibooks use the subpage convention :(
- If you're using the Xml functions, you don't have to use
htmlspecialchars explicitly. It will double-escape the variable.
- Variable names that are in Italian are kind of funny, but not really
in accordance with our coding standards. :) $conta -> $count, $numero -> $number
Yes, it was a beta, I'll fix them (italian was for developing :D )
This is only a quick glance, mind you. I haven't actually tested it and probably won't find the time to do so.
Overall, I'm not sure this is the best way to tackle the problem. Has Wikibooks considered, for instance, having the books' "main pages" be in the main namespace, and the various pages be in a namespace like "Page"? Then the problem is partly solved right away: you can use Special:AllPages set to the main namespace to get a list of books. For NUMBEROFBOOKS, you just need PAGESINNAMESPACE to be enabled, which is fairly feasible at some point if someone's willing to do a little optimization work, since it's a generally-requested feature.
I think it is not very intuitive -- the real content should be in the main namespace. The best thing would be that each Wikibooks followed the subpages naming convention (book title/chapter). IT may be a multilingual policy or something like that.
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 :-).
--Ramac
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:33 PM, mike.lifeguard mike.lifeguard@gmail.com wrote:
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
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