[Mediawiki-l] Easy creation of page sequences

[Sam.Sexton at thomsonreuters.com]

Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I create a template for grouped
pages and include it in all the pages (often at top and bottom for easy
navigation). Then when you need to add a page, you just have the one
template file to update. The current page is shown as bold, so it's easy
to go through the pages in order if that's what you want - I just wanted
an easy index.

<div style="font-size:0.9em">
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0|Home ]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Administration|Administration]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Maintenance Procedures|Maintenance Procedures]]
&bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Error reporting|Error Reporting]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Backup and restore procedures|Backup and restore
procedures]]

[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Customisation|Customisation]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/MediaWiki installation page|MediaWiki Installation
]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/MySQL install log|MySQL install log]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/PHP logs|PHP logs]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/SAFE integration|SAFE integration]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/SMW|Semantic MediaWiki]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Migration|Migration]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Migration/MediaWiki setup log|MediaWiki setup log
]]

[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/D3000|D3000 ]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/D3Wiki|D3Wiki ]] &bull; 
[[IG:TGSTWiki 1.13.0/Migration/d3wiki setup|D3Wiki setup]]
</div> 


/Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Marc
van Leerdam
Sent: 14 September 2009 22:11
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Easy creation of page sequences

Hi,

I have been trying to create a maintainable way of grouping pages
together and allowing readers to page through them in sequence. Most
samples I've seen use templates that require you to supply the
'previous' and 'next' page. This however results in three page edits to
insert a new page between two existing pages and does not guarantee that
your prev-sequence is identical to the next-sequence...

Being a programmer, that is way too much duplicate and error-prone work
for me ;-) There must be a better way to do this and I was hoping to
solve it with a plain MW installation (with ParserFunctions and
DynamicPageList at the moment).

Given an 'index' page that holds a list of all page titles in the
preferred order, isn't it possible to create a template that selects the
correct previous and next page title given the current page title?

I get stuck in getting the correct lines from the index page. DPL can
select based on section name (= page title), but then the contents of
that index section must be the prev/next links themselves:

=First Page=
Prev [[Second Page|Next]]
=Second Page=
[[First Page|Prev]] [[Third Page|Next]]
=Third Page=
.. etc.

This works, except that it is still a lot of duplication of page names
(but the edits are contained in a single page, big plus).

I hoped to simplify the index page by creating a template that writes
the section header and prev/next links, but then DPL no longer
recognizes the sections :-( Apparently DPL 'sees' the page text before
the templates are called ({{Page|Prev page|Page title|Next page}}:

{{Page||First Page|Second Page}}
{{Page|First Page|Second Page|Third Page}} {{Page|Second Page|Third
Page|Fourth Page}}

Basically my questions are:
1. Am I completely off track here?
2. Can DPL be coerced to evaluate templates before looking at the page
3. Can DPL (or another extension) select the text from a section
before/after a matched section?
4. Is it possible to determine the section sequence number given the
section name (so 'Second Page' results in 2, allowing me to use DPL to
retrieve the name of section 2 -/- 1 and 2 + 1 to create the prev/next
links?

Apologies for the long post, hopefully someone can point me to some good
resources (I've been to Meta, Wikibooks, Medawiki.org but could very
well have overlooked something there as the amount of info is a bit
overwhelming and it is difficult to judge how up to date it is).

--
Regards,

Jean-Marc

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