Florence Devouard wrote:

Hello

Does Wikibooks have a wishlist in terms of technical developments that might be useful for the project ? I am currently hacking down a quick grant request with another organization, and, if I do it well, we'll be concerned. So, if there are specific development which might be super useful, please say so, I might get it added somewhere.

Thanks

Ant

I got a wishlist for Wikibooks of technical developments that would be a boon for Wikibooks I think.

1. Extend Special:Random to be able to return a random book rather then a random module from a random or specific namespace. Right now we do this in JavaScript, so anyone not using a JavaScript-enabled browser can't benefit from this.

2. Extend Special:Search to be able to search in only a specific book. Right now we use JavaScript and make use of Google to return search results for only a specific book. Which like the previous one can't be used by anyone not using a JavaSript-enabled browser. Would also be nice to remove the dependency on an external search engine.

3. Extend Special:AllPages so that it can optionally list books instead of all pages.

4. {{NUMBEROFBOOKS}} to return the total number of books Wikibooks has, as opposed to {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} which returns the total number of pages. Would be useful to be able to display on the front page how many books Wikibooks has rather then listing the total number of pages we have.

5. Add a book organization meta page, which defines the book layout and how each page in a book relates to another page in the book. This would be the bases of many features: a) adding navigation buttons to the previous and next page in a book for online reading in a consistent way b) generating a book's table of contents c) generating headers and footers that should appear on every page d) generating printable versions of an entire book and for saving an entire book in different formats like PDF for easy redistribution. e) listing all required licenses for inclusion in redistributed form and attributing the authors in order to comply with licenses. This would make the job much easier and create a consistent way to do so. f) adding css stylesheet elements that are used on every page of a book to encourage consistency and uniformity for a book, both for online viewing and in printed form. This would make it much more practical to have style guidelines work for each book and for everyone to see the same thing.

The basic idea is that by knowing how each page relates to one another and how elements on a page should look it becomes much easier to create consistency between all the pages, to read a book, and reuse and redistribute our books.

6. Add a <includeonce></includeonce> tag so that something can be included once. Example: Template:A has "<includeonce>Hello<includeonce>" Template:B includes {{A}}, and Template:C includes {{B}}. "Hello" would appear on Template:A and Template:B, but not on Template:C, because Template:A was indirectly included in Template:C. This would be useful for inclusion of content directly within another template, but in which should go no further then that.

7. Add {{CURRENTPAGENAME}} or similar for getting the name of PageA within PageB when PageA is included in PageB.

8. Add an extension for being able to display musical symbols, programming symbols and other symbols found in other fields of study not covered by the <math></math> tag.

9. Caching needs to be improved to be more intuitive for pages that are included a lot or include a lot of inclusions, because when they are updated, the updates are not reflected and creates a lot of strange results.

10. On the same bases as #9, Fix template inclusion limitations. I can understand having a limit to including a template within itself and templates that include each other, in order to prevent infinity loops. However limiting how many times a template can be included on a different page that isn't included in the template being used directly or indirectly has caused some problems, which shouldn't be at risk of causing infinity loops if such limitations are removed and is needed.

If caching is part of the reason for having this limitation, then a possible solution might be to make use of IFRAME's, so that the server only has to process and/or retrieve once and caching can happen on the client side for each repeated appearance of a template.

Thats all I can think of for now. I'm sure I'll think of others and I'm sure other people have ideas as well that they will want to mention as well. Someone has already informed those on English Wikibooks about this wish list message.

-- darklama