Aaron recently committed an update to Special:SpecialPages [1] which adds the long-awaited functionality of splitting the list of pages up into shorter manageable sub-lists. Hurrah! However he didn't notice bug 10457 [2] which deals with this issue and which (a) has a couple of suggested groupings for the various pages and (b) already had a patch (which I contributed) for solving this same problem.
Before 1.13 comes out and this ends up in an official release I would like to open up some discussion about a couple of points:
#1 - Extensions
My patch was written to allow extensions to easily add themselves to a particular section, with any non-categorised extensions falling through into a 'misc' section at the bottom. This was deliberately designed to be backward compatible and easy to use.
In Aaron's method, SpecialPage:setGroup( $pagename, $group ) is the code to use, which has two potential drawbacks: * Extensions need to explicitly check which version of MW they are running on before calling the code, otherwise errors will occur in earlier versions which don't have this function. * It requires an extra function call - this may not be a major problem (and may just be a subjective matter of coding style), but it is if it causes the SpecialPage class to be loaded permaturely (I don't know if this is the case or not).
It would be good to get a bit of feedback on the two methods used to see which is considered better in terms of both future-proofing and backwards-compatibility (and of course any other considerations that may apply). Of course, if there's no particular benefit to either method then we should use the one that's already in place.
#2 - Grouping
There have now been three proposed groupings of the special pages. Aaron's (currently live on WMF sites), Mine (in the patch I attached to the bug) and Simetrical's (in the initial bug description). Obviously, I think mine is best, but I don't think any of them are quite right yet. It would be good to get some discussion and settle on a decent order.
Also, in my view there should be no sections with just a single item (my code avoids this by moving single-item sections into 'miscellaneous', which would be an easy thing to add to Aaron's code) and also the default sections should not be as big as (for example) 'Other special pages' currently is.
Thanks to Aaron for getting this long-awaited feature into core.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
[1] http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&revision=33197 [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10457