[Mediawiki-l] Announcing PagesOnDemand extension

[Jim Hu]

Another "Ive been meaning to do this for months" message.
Jim Wilson and I made an extension system we call PagesOnDemand a  
while ago.

	http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PagesOnDemand

We wanted an easy way to force certain pages to use defined templates  
based on the structure of the page title. With PagesOnDemand, pages  
are created from templates when users follow links if the link  
matches a string comparison that tells the PagesOnDemand system that  
the desired page is of a desired type. For example, pages with titles  
that match the regular expression '/^PMID:\\d+$/' are recognized by  
PagesOnDemand.php+PMID_OnDemand.php as being about articles in the  
scientific literature. When the system recognizes this pattern, it  
creates a page based on a template for wiki articles about the  
scientific literature and then forwards the user to the newly created  
page, instead of to an edit page. PagesOnDemand effectively makes  
some "red links" behave like "blue links".

I call it an extension system since it's an extension that supports  
the creation of other extension that do the actual work.

  Major thanks to Jim W. for helping with this based on my original  
half-baked idea.  The good aspects of the code are all his; I'll take  
credit for the ugly bits.
=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054