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.

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

Save the file to complete the installation.

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

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:

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.

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

Feedback welcomed at bgcb11 at gmail.com