[Mediawiki-l] Special page extensions with context-dependent help

[Jim Hu]

My TableEdit special page extension has multiple views, so the next  
version (0.8x) is going to have a help link on each view.  The page  
will have

=TableEdit=
==Page_title of page where the table came from [TableEdit Help]==

The help link is put in as a span, using class = 'editsection'.   
Clicking the TableEdit help link will take the user to a context- 
dependent help page, based on storing the referring view in $_SESSION  
(which is a minor part of the agonizing over sessions in an earlier  
thread).  I have this working in my prototype, and I'm loading  
wgMessageCache with the content of the help pages only when that help  
page is called (inspired by tips from Tim Starling and others in yet  
another earlier thread on the wikitech list).

What I don't have yet, but am thinking of adding, is to have the  
extension first check to see if a page exists in the Help namespace  
for the topic of interest.  If yes, transclude it in the special page  
instead of using the help text from the distribution.

Thoughts? Has this been done? It probably won't be implemented until a  
later release.

Also, in case anyone is interested, the next release of TableEdit will  
be able to recover its own tables from the wikitext in addition to  
using the database (but it doesn't work without the database).  It  
will also allow reordering columns by shifting them left or right.

I'm periodically uploading the code for my prototype for version 0.8x  
to:

http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=142733

The path is wiki-extensions/branches/TableEdit.  Most of it seems to  
work for me, but there are unfinished parts (esp. the abovementioned  
help docs).  But caveat emptor - my code is not up to MW  
standards! ... it tends to be littered with bits from trial and error  
coding, including vestigial code that doesn't actually do anything.

=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054