Erik Moeller wrote:
Ashar-
Developpers and wikifarm administrators will be able to post lengthy articles about the various things happening. Be it new servers added to the farm, new features being developped or polling the user base to help us make choices.
I strongly believe that MediaWiki should support chronological display of content blocks. Essentially, you would have something like
{{News:5 new abstracts}}which would insert summaries of the 5 most recently created pages from the News: namespace in reverse chronological order + link to talk page. This could be done with any existing namespace. (The abstracts would have to somehow marked up in the source page, e.g. using <abstract></abstract>.)
What about updates? This could be solved through the minor/major edit flags. Minor edits do not affect the sort order, while major edits push a story to the top.
Add in a "Post new entry" link that creates a page in the desired namespace, and you've got a nice wikiblog. For Wikinews I think some more advanced workflow will be necessary, but for what you are proposing this should be enough.
So I strongly suggest hacking on something like this instead of installing a blog software. Blogs are a dime a dozen and do not make good use of the potential of collaboration.
Regards,
Erik
Helo,
Of course it's possible to hack MediaWiki further more. But I believe it's far easier to install a blog software, have it ready and set up in like 10 minutes.
The aim of the blog will not aim at building a cooperative content, that's what wiki is for. Instead it will help easily publish important messages from the dev/admin team to the userbase be it maintenance, new releases, ongoing changes available on test.wikipedia.org .