Hi everybody,
First of all, thanks to all MediaWiki developers for such a useful program. I have been
using it for many years and it's really amazing.
I recently developed a MediaWiki extension, that allows to export news in RSS 2.0 and
Atom 1.0 format in easy manner. First I developed it for my own site, but I thought it
could be useful for other projects, especially for Wikinews. I talked to Wikinews
enthusiasts on their mailing list, and they agree, that it's a good idea. It's
really better than current system - now they use some external tool, but only headlines
are exported without actual content, Atom format is not supported, and sometimes it stops
updating.
My extension is called "News Channel" and is available at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:News_Channel. Basically, when user or aggregation
program requests a feed, the extension gets specified number of latest articles from some
specified news categories (e.g. [[Category:Published]]), exports it to RSS/Atom feed
format and sends to user. Articles's title will be the headline and article's text
will be the description of news item. It's possible to combine and exclude categories
(e.g. [[Category:Published]] + [[Category:Sports]] - [[Category:Disputed]]) to get
specific news only.
What steps should now be taken to install that extension on Wikinews project?
Thanks in advance,
with best regards,
Iaroslav Vassiliev
1. You should get commit access to Wikimedia Subversion, so you can
easily maintain your extension
2. Extension are installed if there is a bug in the bugzilla and Brion
reviews it.
3. But before it is installed it have to be cleaned up:
* All configuration should be done by $wg* globals (some of it - to
MediaWiki: messages)
* You should get channel language from $wgContLang
* System of "authorized editors" should be migrated to permissions
system ($wgGroupPermissions et al)
* You should use Feed classes instead of generating feeds by yourself
* Wikimedia uses MySQL 4, which doesn't support nested queries
* "Designed and tested on MediaWiki 1.8.2". No comments. We use 1.13 now
* Ah, and the last advice: remove your email address or spammers will
eat you.
--VasilievVV