User:Jamesmontalvo3/Approved Revs v1.0

Approved Revs is an extension that lets users mark a certain revision of a page or file as "approved". The approved revision is the one displayed when users view the page at its main URL. When an image is displayed on a page, the approved revision is shown.

Approved Revs was designed to be a simple, lightweight alternative to the FlaggedRevs extension. FlaggedRevs is a very feature-rich, heavy-duty extension that provides not just revision approval but also reviewing and related features; it defines 4 user rights, 3 user groups, 15 global variables, 3 log types, 11 special pages and 9 database tables (by contrast, Approved Revs defines TBD user rights, no user groups, TBD global variables, TBD log type, 1 special page and 2 database tables). If you're running a large-scale wiki like, say, Wikipedia, where the decision of which revision to show as the "official" one has to be made by, or at least accepted by, many people, FlaggedRevs is most likely the right tool to use. However, if you're running a small- or medium-scale wiki, with just a few administrators, Approved Revs may be the more appropriate solution.

Even if a revision is approved, most extensions that retrieve the contents of pages will still get the last revision, and not the approved one (if the two are different). Extensions that get specific data from pages, however, such as Semantic MediaWiki and DPL, will, fortunately, display the correct (i.e., approved) data.

Download
You can download the Approved Revs code, in .zip format, here.

You can also download the code directly via Git from the MediaWiki source code repository. From a command line, you can call the following:

To view the code online, including version history for each file, go here.

Un-nowiki this later:

Installation
To install this extension, create an ' ' directory (either by extracting a compressed file or downloading via Git), and place this directory within the main MediaWiki 'extensions' directory. Then, in the file ' ', add the following line:

You will also need to install two database tables for this extension called "approved_revs" and "approved_revs_files". You can do this in one of two ways: either run the script "update.php" in MediaWiki's /maintenance directory, or apply the SQL files directly to your database - they are   and.

MediaWiki's text search (i.e., the Special:Search page) will search pages based on the contents of their approved revision, if they have one. However, if you're using MediaWiki 1.19, the display of search results will still show the page's latest revision. To get this working correctly, you will have to apply a small patch to the core MediaWiki code - you can see it here.

Finally, there is one user right defined for Approved Revs: ' '. Users with this permission see a note at the top of pages that have an approved revision, explaining that what the user is seeing is not necessarily the latest revision. By default it is given to everyone (i.e, '*'), but can be modified to only be given to administrators by adding the following to LocalSettings.php below the inclusion of Approved Revs:

Defining Approvers
Defining who can approve pages is done at the page MediaWiki:Approvedrevs-permissions.

NEED EXPLANATION OF Approvedrevs-permissions

Usage
Once the extension is installed (and any changes to MediaWiki:Approvedrevs-permissions have been made), anyone with approval permissions for a given page will see a link that reads "(approve)" on each row of a page history page. Clicking on that link will set that revision as the approved one. If you then go back to the history page, you will see the revision you just approved is now highlighted green and is marked with a star and the text "Approved Revision". The approved revision also has an "unapprove" link on the far right. Every other revision has an "approve" link. Clicking "approve" for any other revision will re-set the approval to that revision; while clicking "unapprove" will mean that there will no longer be an approved revision for this page.

Users without approval capability will see nothing special in the history page, other than a star icon on the approved revision's row.

By default, if a user with approval capability makes an edit to a page that already has an approved revision, that edit, i.e. the latest revision of the page, gets automatically marked as approved. By contrast, if a page has no approved revision (this of course includes new pages), automatic approvals will not be applied.

You can eliminate automatic approvals, thus requiring that every approval has to be done manually, by adding the following to  below the inclusion of Approved Revs:

Conversely, if you set  to true in   (see below), every edit made by a user with approval capability becomes approved - even edits to pages that don't have an approved revision.

Manual revision approvals and unapprovals get stored in the 'approval' log; though approvals that happen automatically, as a result of someone with approval power editing a page, do not.

Special:ApprovedRevs page
Approved Revs defines a special page,, which can show two sets of lists: one for pages and one for files. Each set includes: all pages that have an approved revision, all pages whose approved revision is not their latest revision, all pages that do not have an approved revision, and pages considered "grandfathered". The grandfathered pages list shows pages that have approvals even though they do not meet the requirements laid out on ''MediaWiki:Approvedrevs-permissions. ''Generally this list should be blank, but is included in order to list pages which should perhaps be unapproved.

For the third list, of pages with no approved revision, you can optionally include a link for each page to mark that page's latest revision as approved. To include such links, add the following to :

Displaying unapproved pages as blank
If you want to, you can have pages that have no approved revision show up as blank - users will still be able to see all the revisions if they click on the "history" tab, but the main display will be a blank page. To do that, just add the following line to, anywhere after the inclusion of Approved Revs:

Indicating unapproved pages
By default, pages with no approved revision simply show up normally, with no indication of their status. You can have such pages display a message at the top saying, "This is the latest revision of this page; it has no approved revision." To do that, add the following line to :

CONTINUE FROM HERE

Setting pages as approvable
Some wiki pages can have their revisions approved, while others cannot; this is generally determined by namespace. A global variable, $egApprovedRevsNamespaces, exists, that determines which namespaces are handled by the extension. This variable is an array, and by default it holds five namespaces: NS_MAIN (the main namespace), NS_USER (user pages), NS_TEMPLATE (templates), NS_HELP (help pages) and NS_PROJECT (the project namespace, which usually has the same name as the wiki). You can add additional namespaces to this set - after the inclusion of Approved Revs in, add something like: It is not recommended to add the File/Image, Category or MediaWiki namespaces to this array, because, due to their special implementation in MediaWiki, approvals will not work correctly on those pages.

Individual pages not within one of the specified namespaces can also be made approvable, by adding the magic word anywhere within the page. It is recommended to add in this magic word to pages via a template. If  is added directly to a page, just be careful not to approve a revision of the page from before that string was added; this could lead to unexpected behavior.

Letting non-administrators "own" pages
Sometimes it's helpful to allow those without the general ' ' permission to be able to approve revisions of certain pages - in other words, to have ownership of certain pages. An obvious example is user pages - it makes sense to allow each user to be able to approve revisions on their own user pages. For namespaces other than "User", you can choose to have the user who originally created any page in that namespace be designated as the page owner, who then has revision-approval permission for that page.

To have this kind of "ownership" for a specific namespace, you need to add the namespace to the variable. To allow users to "own", i.e. be able to approve, pages in the main and user namespaces, for instance, you should add the following to LocalSettings.php:

A namespace needs to belong to  before it can be added to.

Marking all pages as approved
For pages that do not yet have an approved revision, you may want to automatically approve their latest revision, as a way to quickly initialize their content. For that, you can use the command line script ' '. This script approves the latest revision of all pages that can be approved but do not have an approved revision.

Authors
Approved Revs was written by Yaron Koren. Important code contributions were also made by Raimond Spekking, Siebrand Mazeland, Jeroen De Dauw, Eli Handel and James Montalvo.

Version history
Approved Revs is currently at version 0.7. See the entire version history.

Known issues

 * When using MediaWiki 1.19, the "approve" link does not show up for all revisions in the history page, when viewing the page with the Google Chrome or Safari browsers.

Bugs and feature requests
Send any bug reports and requests to Yaron Koren, at yaron57 -at- gmail.com.

Contributing patches to the project
If you found some bug and fixed it, or if you wrote code for a new feature, please either do a Git commit for it, or create a patch by going to the " " directory, and typing:

git diff > descriptivename.patch

If you create a patch, please send it, with a description, to Yaron Koren.

Translating
Translation of ApprovedRevs is done through translatewiki.net. The translation for this extension can be found here. To add language values or change existing ones, you should create an account on translatewiki.net, then request permission from the administrators to translate a certain language or languages on this page (this is a very simple process). Once you have permission for a given language, you can log in and add or edit whatever messages you want to in that language.

Un-nowiki this when released: