Hi, I was wondering if someone out there could please point out a better way to store some data I'm using in this extension.

The basic premise is to display a header or footer for all pages within a given namespace or category (it also allows a global one, or page specific). I decided to leverage MediaWiki's ability to edit pages to store the actual headers and footers, which made a lot of sense because they are wikitext.

I obviously don't want them searched, so at first I put them in NS_MEDIAWIKI. The urls look something like: MediaWiki:HeadersFooters/Cat/<catname>/Header

Alphos and bawolff pointed out in IRC that if I was going to use NS_MEDIAWIKI I should make them more message like... so I've converted to: MediaWiki:headersfooters-cat-<catname>-header

And I'm checking if the message exists before fetching the contents using wfMsgForContentNoTrans. This is interesting because technically an administrator could make some multi-langual messages in the i18n file manually. A potential problem is that as far as I know messages aren't really supposed to be mixed case, and a category name inserted into <catname> could definitely have some uppercase letters in it.

Reedy in IRC mentioned this was all awful, but didn't offer any suggestions when I asked.

Another idea I had was to store these messages as pages in a custom namespace, like HeadersFooters:Cat/<catname>/Header -- although I have no clue how I would go about making my extension add a new custom namespace without the admin having to go and make them herself, so some information about this would be much appreciated.

Yet another would be to store them in a new database table, but this sounds really clunky and icky, but maybe I'm wrong and it's slick? It would necesitate I create all these editing and management pages for the new table.

I'm designing a SpecialPage to make sure users can make these headers and footers more easily.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Anything would be appreciated, - Olivier Finlay Beaton