[Mediawiki-l] How to add sub-pages of "special:nnnpages" to navigation bar?

[Brion Vibber]

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Monahon, Peter B. wrote:
>> Brion wrote: ... The strings in 
>> MediaWiki:Sidebar ARE NOT TEXT 
>> STRINGS, they are MESSAGE KEY NAMES.
>> You should list something like:
>>   ourwiki-url|ourwiki-text
>> then in 
>>  MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url 
>> you put:
>>  http://our-wiki-url/mediawiki/index.php?
>> title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&namespace=1
>> and in 
>>  MediaWiki:Ourwiki-text 
>> you put:
>>   Discussion/talk index
>> This keeps things clean and localizable.
> 
> Peter Blaise responds: Uh ... thanks, Brion ... but ... by what method
> would I "put", as in:
> "put http://our-wiki-url/mediawiki/index.php?
> title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&namespace=1 
> into MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url"?

1) Go to the page "MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url" on your wiki.

There are several ways to go to a page on your wiki.

One is to type the name directly into the URL bar in your browser, in
the part of your wiki's URL where the page title appears. (Sometimes
when the name contains special characters, like "?" or "&" this doesn't
work properly unless you know the URL encoding techniques, but don't
worry about that.

Another is to type it into the "Search" box in the sidebar and click the
"Go" button. If the page doesn't exist, usually you will be offered a
link to create the page at this point, and you can just click it.

A third would be to add a link on an existing page by editing it and
typing a link, like [[MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url]]. Then you could click on
the link. (This might be a good idea if you're keeping a page of notes
about your configuration.)


2) Click the "edit" link to go into edit mode.

This might not be necessary if you followed an edit link using the
"search" or "create a link on another page" methods above.

Note that all 'MediaWiki:' pages are restricted, because they are a
special type of page which is used by the software. So you need to be
logged in as a sysop account in order to edit them.

If you are working with MediaWiki:Sidebar then you should already have
that part down; it has the same restriction as any new page you would be
adding.


3) Put stuff in.

Typing usually works. ;)

Also you might do cut-and-paste if you already have the link somewhere else.

> Do you mean "edit messages.inc" ... and any other configuration master
> files?

You should never edit the Messages*.php files unless you are very sure
what you are doing.

In most circumstance you need do this only if you are modifying and
maintaining the core software distribution. As a maintainer of a
particular wiki on a particular server, you would not generally do this.

There's some information and background on the
internationalization/localization system used in MediaWiki at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:System_message

(This is not a how-to guide, though there are a number of specific tasks
outlined. In general you are expected to be able to apply your learned
knowledge through critical thinking and experimentation.)


As for the sidebar system specifically, I'm aware that it's pretty
confusing. It's complex in part because it has several conflicting
requirements for customizability, localization, and continued
functionality in mixed-maintenance environments (eg where some, but not
all languages are being actively maintained on the wiki).

In the future we may hope there will be a more "integrated"
user-friendly way to set up sidebar entries. The current sidebar
customization system is targetted at power users who are willing and
able to figure out the quirks, but need to be able to edit it at the
wiki admin level (through a MediaWiki: page) instead of the server admin
level (through LocalSettings.php).

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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