[Mediawiki-l] using dates and calendar

[Rowan Collins]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 13:10:07 +0000, Jason Davies <ucgajpd at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> does anyone have a good suggestion for how to get started with using
> dates, as the wikipedia does? does this involve extra installation of
> any kind? thanks.

I think you need to be more specific as to what you mean here. There
are all sorts of things to do with dates that Wikipedia does, from
putting them into different formats by user preference (a software
feature) to having things, such as the Front Page, change day by day
(a clever use of templates and magic variables like {{CURRENTDAY}}) to
having an article on each date with various things related to that.

I suspect the last one is what you may be referring to, simply because
your subject line says "...and calendar". Each date page on Wikipedia
has a calendar displayed on it, made it seems out of an extremely
complex system of nested templates - [[Template:JanuaryCalendar]],
[[Template:JanuaryCalendar2005]],
[[Template:JanuaryCalendar2005Source]],
[[Template:31DayCalendarStartingOnSaturday]], etc, etc. No special
software feature here, certainly no extra installation, just one hell
of a lot of setting up templates to do whatever people have made those
calendars capable of doing. I have literally no idea why they are so
complicated, and couldn't immediately find anywhere explaining how
they work; but presumably *someone* knows - maybe User:ABCD, who seems
to have created some of them, could tell you...

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]