Hello, I am willing to know if we are willing to use a blog software to communicate with wikipedians and mediawiki users.

you dropped the forum idea ? :-)

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.

Ashar- 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

I think http://dev.wikimedia.org/ would be a good place to have a development wiki with blog stuff.

Looks like my next task will be to create a phpbb<->mediawiki communication :o)

I proposed something similar some weeks ago, WikiForum. Here is the idea: - New thread is created into "thread:" namespace then anybody can edit it like all other pages. - Each time a thread file is edited a forum page is rebuild according to last modified thread. - The X lasted threads are fully included into forum page (like templates). - The Y next threads are included into a table showing some information (title, date of last modification, last modifier, etc.) - All is full Mediawiki compatible (same syntax, same user account, etc.). In fact the idea aimed on create an auto?cleaning village pump (=the forum) but I think we can enhance it to provide RSS/ATOM feed and so on. I created a prototype that some wikipedians tried, but I didn't carry on the development. If someone is interest in sharing experience and go on this idea or something similar, contact me.