"Simetrical" Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote in message news:7c2a12e20803050907x3895a8f8o7d900a5fb589571f@mail.gmail.com...
On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Raimond Spekking raimond.spekking@gmail.com wrote:
The intention was to give this extra flexibility. You can use multiple columns now and sort in any manner the community finds it useful.
But I will think about/work on your suggestion to use messagekeys instead to avoid duplication of the special pages list.
But what happens when an extension adds a special page? What happens when a new special page is added to the core software? It will be put at the end until someone manually alters the list. Maybe you're giving a little extra flexibility, but on the other hand you're forcing more ongoing maintenance to get it to work nicely.
As a wiki administrator, for something as trivial as this, I would certainly prefer to have a sensible ordering that I *couldn't* change than a modifiable ordering that I *had to* change. Especially given that with an appropriate hook or two, any changes I really wanted could be done by extensions.
I've been planning to rework the Special:SpecialPages page for a while now, but it looks like someone has beaten me to it! In case it's any use, here's how I was planning to implement the change:
Each special page would have an extra 'section' parameter added to it's definition, e.g. 'user-management'.
The special page list would group items under their sections, in alphabetical order. If a section only has one item then it is added to a special 'miscellaneous' category instead, to stop a list where there are loads of single-element sections.
The labels for each section are pulled from the MediaWiki namespace, at sp-section-name, e.g. 'sp-section-user-management'. If no string is defined, then hyphens become spaces and each word is capitalised (or rather, put into appropriate title-case for the interface language).
Extensions also specify a 'section' when they are defined. These may be one of the built-in sections or a new one. The fact that sections with a single entry are collapsed into the 'miscellaneous' section avoids the problem of having many extensions that each specify a different section, whilst stopping extensions from being restricted to a potentially fairly narrow group of built-in sections.
A global variable $wgSpecialPageSectionOverrides allows sections to be overridden if necessary (key is name of special page, value is new section to put it in).
The page output is nicely wrapped in CSS classes so that layout can be modified (columns, boxes, etc.).
I hope some of these notes help with the implementation of this feature. I'd be happy to contribute further, either to discussions or coding, if that would be useful.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)