Hi,
Sergey Chernyshev and I are pleased to announce Semantic Bundle, a recently-released package of MediaWiki extensions based around Semantic MediaWiki. It's meant to simplify usage of Semantic MediaWiki, by bundling it together with 15 other extensions that are commonly used in conjunction with SMW, into one downloadable .zip or .tgz file. You can read more about Semantic Bundle, and download it, here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_Bundle
To quote from that page, there are a number of benefits to Semantic Bundle:
- it provides a "best practices" set of extensions around Semantic MediaWiki, based on user experiences - it simplifies download, especially for those systems that don't have SVN, and especially for those extensions (like ParserFunctions) that don't have a downloadable version already - it tries to guarantee working code by using tagged, stable versions of extensions whenever possible - it simplifies installation by providing a pre-generated list of includes
To amplify on the third point, the plan is to update the Semantic Bundle downloadables whenever a tag is incremented on one of the tagged extensions that it uses. If you didn't know about tags, they've been supported for a while on the MediaWiki SVN repository, although not that many extensions use them yet. You can see their location here:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/extensions/
We also encourage anyone who maintains an extension to create a tag for their extensions, in order to create "stable" versions.
Also, we hope that Semantic Bundle will serve as a model for other extension "bundles" in the future. As the number of MediaWiki extensions continues to grow, it becomes harder for administrators to research, download and install every extension that might be useful to them; bundles help to streamline that process. It should be noted that Semantic Bundle is not the first bundle of extensions to be released, and not even the first SMW-based one; that would be the "SMW+" package, created by Ontoprise. That one is different, though, in that it includes MediaWiki itself, and in fact at the moment it's a modified, patched version of MW, which makes SMW+ somewhat more of an application in itself. So Semantic Bundle may be the first "pure" package of extensions.
-Yaron Koren