Jim Wilson and I have been working on a new extension, which I call PagesOnDemand that does the following:

Hooks at ArticleFromTitle Uses a regex to look for a pattern in the requested title If the title matches the pattern and the page does not already exist, runs a function to create the desired stub content and saves it

Note that if this runs when a user clicks on a red link, it acts like a blue link - the user is directed to a view of the brand new page. Currently, if the user searches for a page that matches the regex, the extension populates the page if the user clicks the red link in the search page, or clicks "create this page", but they get the edit page.

PagesOnDemand is set up so that other extension writers can add additional regex/content creation combinations. Before I put up a page in mediawiki.org, I'd like to check with the experts here about how I've done a couple of things to let future extensions use PagesOnDemand:

1) The future extensions would need to register to use a "hook" inside the PagesOnDemand extension. So I'd like to reserve that hook name - or whatever the devs want me to name it -within reason ; ) - within mediawiki. I assume that this would have to be approved by Brion et al? (I use "hook" in quotes because I'm not using RunHooks to run the function).

2) To keep the regex and the function together, I've set it up so that the content creator extensions register by pushing a 2-element array onto $wgHooks, where the array is (regex, functionName). For example, to look for page titles that correspond to PubMed IDs (which is why I wrote it), the creator extension uses:

$wgHooks['PagesOnDemand'][] = array('/^PMID:\d+ $/','wfPubMedOnDemand') ;

Is this kosher ? Jim W. doesn't like it, but I don't like his alternative, which is to pass the regex matching to the content creator. I don't want to distribute the code on mediawiki.org if it does something evil. Thanks in advance for advice.

Jim ===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054