Extension:Newest Pages Blog

The Newest Pages Blog extension adds an includable special page to MediaWiki which shows the most recently created or updated pages on the wiki, in weblog format. The format of the entries can be customized, and several query filtering options are available. The blog entries can be accessed as a regular special page, included within other pages as a form of dynamic list, or accessed as an RSS/Atom feed.

An demo of this extension in action may be seen here

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Readme
NEWEST PAGES BLOG EXTENSION

Version 1.0 © 2006 Benjamin Bradley

This is free software licensed under the GNU General Public Licence. Please see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html for further details, including the full text and terms of the licence.

Overview
1. Introduction 2. Installing the extension 3. Accessing the special page 4. Including the special page 5. Customising the interface text 6. Change log

1. Introduction
The Newest Pages Blog extension adds an includable special page to MediaWiki which shows the most recently created or updated pages on the wiki, in weblog format. The format of the entries can be customized, and several query filtering options are available. The blog entries can be accessed as a regular special page, included within other pages as a form of dynamic list, or accessed as an RSS/Atom feed.

2. Installing the extension
To install the Newest Pages Blog extension, first upload/copy the extension files NewestPagesBlog.php and NewestPagesBlog.i18n.php into your MediaWiki extensions directory. Then edit your LocalSettings.php file and add the following line:

require_once( 'extensions/NewestPagesBlog.php' );

Save the file to complete the installation.

3. Accessing the special page
To access the special page in the regular view mode, go to Special:Newestpagesblog on your wiki, or select it from the list of special pages.

The page has a default and maximum limit of 50 items, which can be customised using the supplied limit links, or with the 'limit' parameter in the page URL.

To add customized parameters, use the following syntax:

...Special:NewestPagesBlog/parameter1=value1/parameter2=value2/etc

Parameters can include any combination of: limit=[number of pages to show] defaults to 50, the maximum value (to reduce strain on the database)

namespace=[namespace of pages to show] default to all, use - for main namespace

order=updated|new default to new, determines the order in which pages are pulled

author=[user] default to all, pull only creations/updates by the given user

format=blog|atom|rss default to blog, choose atom or rss for feed output

For example: http://...NewestPagesBlog/limit=20/namespace=Talk/order=updated - would show the 20 most recently updated pages in the "Talk" namespace http://...NewestPagesBlog/limit=10/namespace=-/user=Benjamin - would show the 10 pages created most recently by the user Benjamin in the main namespace

4. Including the special page
To include the special page into another page, add the following wiki markup to that page:

This will be replaced with the blog entries when the containing page is rendered. To add customized parameters, use the following syntax:

For example: would show the newest pages in the user namespace. Use - to select the main namespace. To select a namespace AND set a limit, use syntax similar to the following:

5. Customising the interface text
The interface text and message formats used in the Newest Pages Blog extension are customisable via the MediaWiki namespace. See Special:Allmessages for a list of customisable interface messages in the wiki. In addition to the messages used by the NewestPages extension, the NewestPagesBlog extension adds the following:

newestpagesblog-dateformat - customizable date format - uses php's 			date format - see http://us2.php.net/date

newestpagesblog-entryformat - format of entry. can include special values: $1 - date, formatted according to above $2 - title of the page $3 - category list $4 - entry, brief format $5 - user who posted $6 - "created" or "updated" depending on if order is new or updated

newestpagesblog-entryheader - shown before the entry list

newestpagesblog-entryfooter - shown after the entry list

newestpagesblog-summaryendmarker - the text which marks the end of the summary/description at the top of the page. Defaults to "" which means that all text before the first horizontal line in the page will be used as the "description" for that page.

6. Change log
2006-06-14 Version 1.0 * Initial release

Feedback welcomed at .

Download
The latest version of the extension is available from http://dev.nomadicscribe.net/mediawiki/downloads/