Re: Wiki extension request

[Ian Weller]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 04:05:37PM +0000, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  We've identified a couple of extensions which can potentially
> achieve
>  this:
>  
>  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Multi-Category_Search
>  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList_%28Wikimedia%29 
[snip]

>  There are a couple of concerns that I don't have sufficient
> expertise to
>  address. There would need to be some kind of, I guess, API access to the
>  searches, so that an external tool could do the search - both extensions
>  seem rather geared to doing the search entirely within the Wiki, for
>  instance, including the results of the search in another page. I don't
>  know how to tell which, if either, extension is most suited to this. The
>  other concern is recursion - does either extension handle this case:
>  
>  page is a member of categories A and Z, but not directly of category B
>  category A is a member of category B
>  
>  if searching for 'all pages that are in category B and Z', does the page
>  show up? For our purposes I'd like that the be the case. 
If you only need multi-category searching in the API, that extension
won't help any, since it doesn't appear to expose anything over the API.

Using the API, however, you can get a list of pages within categories,
and then just use whatever programming language you're using to merge
them together on the client side, not the server side. You can read the
docs for list=categorymembers on fp.o/w/api.php, or we can hack on it at
FUDCon at some point.

(And, if you program it yourself, you can make the merging work however
you want.)

DPL does the same thing, but can be included in any page on the wiki.
That might be useful, if you want that information to show up on the
wiki, but if you're still just wanting to use the API and have it show
up elsewhere, it's not useful at all.

On a more general note, I think we are somewhat shy of having too many
extensions on our wiki instance, because compatibility can break on wiki
upgrades and can also slow down the wiki (one of the main reasons we had
such slowdowns with MoinMoin, IIRC, was too many plugin/extension type
things). Additionally, I've been talking with smooge to get MW upgraded
to 1.16 soon, which will include highly improved API support.

-- 
Ian Weller <ian(a)ianweller.org&gt;
Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com