On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:44 AM, raymond@svn.wikimedia.org wrote:
# Look for 'special:' in the line$pos = strpos( $line, 'special:' );
Eek, case-sensitive?
$canonical = strtolower( trim( substr( $line, $pos + 8 ) ) );
Don't use magic numbers. $pos + strlen( 'special:' ) is more comprehensible.
return '<p style="float:' . $align . ';" class="mw-specialspecialpages-edit">' . $link . '</p>';
Why not put the float style in the class definition?
+== Allgemeine Listen == +:special:Allpages +: special:Prefixindex +;special:Categories +* special:Disambiguations +* special:Listredirects
+== Wartungslisten == +* special:Mostcategories . . .
If you're going to use messages, wouldn't it be better to have a single cross-language message for this, and have the titles be indexes into other messages the way Sidebar does it? Like
== specialpages-generalpagelists == :special:Allpages ...
with MediaWiki:Specialpages-generalpagelists = "General page lists", "Allgemeine Listen", or whatever else? Having a separate message used for every language duplicates a ton of info and will be a big maintenance headache if anyone wants to adjust the display, either in the software or locally on a multilingual wiki.
Also, currently there would be serious problems if you wanted to include the string "special:" in any of the descriptive text, it looks like. Using message keys means this isn't a problem, unless you have "special:" in the message key (which is technically not prohibited, but not conventional and certainly never useful).
There are other problems with using a message altogether, though. Every time a new special page is added to the software, it will appear at the end in any wiki that's customized this message. Every time an extension adds a special page, it will appear at the end in any wiki until an admin picks some arbitrary place to put it. Also, if various wikis decide to use this functionality to sort the pages in all different ways, it will become very confusing for anyone who uses multiple wikis to use the page, since it will be completely different on every wiki. On the other hand, is there any real downside to hardcoding the categories and orderings, having a fixed set of categories and allowing each special page to insert itself into the category it likes best? Does anyone really need this extra flexibility?
But this is definitely a nice change in principle. It's something that I've wanted to see for some time. Special:Specialpages has long since gotten out of hand.