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