On 05/05/07, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
Please provide examples of uses of the Dynamic Page List extensions which would be needed so we have an idea of whether or not we can write said purpose-built extensions to fit those needs.
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.
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?)
For my opinion, the great strength in DPLs is flexibility in order of display, e.g.: * name * date of last change * popularity * user who changed them last * size * restrict the output to the first n articles or to a random sample * use descending or ascending sequence
Whereas categories display first 200 items ordered by name only [give or take a category sort key].
The sort keys I care about most, and that would be most useful for category maintenance, are: * date of creation * date added to a particular category probably also * size (for media).
Ideally I would like to be able to change how category pages are sorted - e.g. have a drop down box "Sort by name" "Sort by date of creation" "Sort by name of last editor" "Sort by size" etc etc.
I understand that DPL2 won't be installed anywhere. But the original DPL seems to have been sufficiently improved since those requests were made, so I think the bug requests are just about wanting DPL functionality rather than especially DPL2.
Until that extra functionality is written and accepted within MW core, couldn't DPL be turned on for the projects that request it?
regards, Brianna