Extension:Purple MediaWiki

What can this extension do?
Purple MediaWiki (PMWX), an extension to be integrated into MediaWiki that allows ﬁne-grained addressability to the content of wiki pages. PMWX achieves its goal of ﬁne-grained addressability by adding identiﬁers called “purple numbers” at the end of content sections on each wiki page. Unlike other web pages, content on a wiki is the result of a collaboration among the users of the wiki. As a result, the content on a wiki changes more frequently than most web pages. As more and more people add content to a web page and then refer to that content, it becomes important to pinpoint the location of the data for future reference or to provide a reference to someone else. Users generally do this by bookmarking a page for future reference or by sending a link to the article. The bookmarking option in a web browser allows one to bookmark the URL, but if this URL is the page as a whole it may be diﬃcult for a user to locate the intended content when the amount of content on the page is large.

HTML allows one to create anchors to speciﬁc points in a web document. Using these links one can link to a particular point within a web document. The idea of directly accessing the information within a web document is an important hallmark of a knowledge management system. To build a system which empowers the user to access information precisely either the web site administrator or the author of the web document must manually create appropriate anchors within every web document. PMWX was developed to eliminate the need for web page authors to create these anchors. This allows a content developer to focus on developing the content; links to diﬀerent parts of the document will be created and added automatically.

Usage of Purple Numbers
The purpose of Purple Numbers is simple: to produce HTML documents that can be addressed with high resolution (also called "fine granularity"). It does this by automatically creating name anchors with hierarchical (hid's) addresses at the beginning of each node, and by displaying these addresses as links at the end of each node. With Purple Numbers in place, all one needs to do is to mouse-over a Purple number, right-mouse-click and COPY that hyperlink. One can then PASTE this hyperlink to an e-mail message, to your instant message, or to a document s/he is composing. That link will now take its reader back to exactly the same paragraph the author wanted to refer his/her reader(s) to.

Requirements

 * MediaWiki 1.13.2
 * PHP 5.x or greater installed and working (version required by MediaWiki)
 * MySQL >= 4.0.14 (version required by MediaWiki)

Notes
 * PMWX is (currently) incompatible with PostgreSQL

Installation
If you upgrade an existing installation of Purple MediaWiki, also read the remarks in the section "Notes on Upgrading" below!

(1) Extract the archive to obtain the directory "pmwx x.x.xx" that contains all relevant files. Copy this directory to "[wikipath]/extensions/" (or extract/download it to this place) and rename it to "pmwx"

(2) Please cut and paste the code found below and place it in. Note: $WIKI stands for the root directory of your MediaWiki installation, the same directory that holds LocalSettings.php.

Testing your Installation
To test whether the extension was installed properly, simply open up any page on the wiki and you should see the purple numbers.

If you don't get these results, check the steps in the Installation section, then contact us (see the Contact section).

Configuration parameters

 * Purple MediaWiki can be customized by a number of settings. To do so, open the file  and change the value for the variables below to suit your needs.

Notes on Upgrading

 * Upgrading from an older version should be a simple process. Simply replace the whole "pmwx" folder with the new one. You may want to backup the PMWX_Global.php to save previous settings.

Contact Us

 * In case you run into any problem or have any questions or would like to report a bug please feel free to email the authors at tparikh@ccs.neu.edu or viral@ccs.neu.edu