On 05/05/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
The main use is much greater flexibility in working with categories. I believe Wikinews uses it on portals to show the newest stories added to a category that corresponds to that portal topic. Almost all projects could use DPLs like this, to display lists of new pages on particular topics. That saves a lot of fussing that is currently done manually. The other main use relates to maintenance.
So, we want something that does new pages in particular categories? Not the easiest of things to get right, perhaps, since categories aren't versioned as pages are, but I expect we might come up with something decent enough.
DPLs also allow category combining (AND, OR, NOT). I believe some category intersection tool is in the works but I don't know how far that's progressed. (IMO having this functionality in a Special page would suffice - would that be preferred to DPL's current implementation?)
The classic intersections use UNION queries which are too expensive; this is part of the reason we don't have a straightforward intersecting search, and hence are having to investigate other means.
Until that extra functionality is written and accepted within MW core, couldn't DPL be turned on for the projects that request it?
You'll need to keep petitioning a server administrator until someone caves in. If the extension is found to be causing unacceptable load on the database servers, I can guarantee it will be killed and deactivated.
Rob Church