Daniel Friesen wrote:
The current implementation of MediaWiki:Sidebar supports a completely undocumented * {{msg}} syntax.
My fault.
This feature didn't exist in 1.16, was introduced but was seemingly completely broken in 1.17 and finally made to work in 1.18.
However I have a number of issues with it: Conceptually:
- The concept makes little sense, it uses the {{}} template syntax, but
actually takes a message from the MediaWiki namespace, and it of course doesn't support any real transclusion syntax
People was *hacking* the code to include arbitrary wikitext [1]. What kind of transclusion syntax would you want? Template parameters???
Implementation:
- The implementation is a mess, with successive {{msgname}} calls in the
same header replacing rather than appending to,
Several "{{msgname}} calls" were never really expected. You are right in that appending would make more sense.
and using a mess of a setup where these blocks are actually put into a separate array which is array_merged into the real sidebar array at the end.
I think there was some reason for doing it that way...
But mostly I have a problem with the fact that it's getting in my way. I'm currently trying to fix up the limitation in our skin system that only allows us to sanely have one type of navigation (the sidebar). With the implementation of a new navigation message parser that can handle varying formats of messages. However {{msgname}} is not something that can see be cleanly implemented in it.
I donn't understand what you are trying to do there, or why {{msgname}} is a problem...
1- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Sidebar#Allow_wiki_markup_.28PHP.29