Extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia)

DynamicPageList is a MediaWiki extension which allows wiki users to create a list of pages that are listed in a set of categories. See m:Help:DPL for general information.

Origin
It was originally developed for Wikinews. It is currently installed on all language Wikinews projects (see n:Wikinews:DynamicPageList), Meta, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity and can be installed on any small to medium sized Wikis (It is known to have scalability issues with very large wikis).

This extension was previously known as DynamicPageList/old and later Intersection. You may also be interested in the third-party DynamicPageList, which has more features.

Installation
DynamicPageList generally works with older (MediaWiki 1.5 and greater) versions if you select the version for 1.13.x from Special:ExtensionDistributor/intersection.

The DynamicPageList extension is in Wikimedia SVN. To install it, get the extension files for your version of MediaWiki, and place them in the  directory. Then add  to the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file.

Use
DynamicPageList can be used with XML-like syntax in the wiki edit view. The parameters control the pages to list, order, and display mode. See the following sections for information on each parameter. For example, the following are the oldest five pages on this wiki that were recently moved to MediaWiki.org.

 category            = Pages recently transferred from Meta count               = 5 order               = ascending addfirstcategorydate = true 

An example of a really complex DynamicPageList:  category=foo count=20 namespace=file addfirstcategorydate=ymd imagewidth=70 galleryshowfilesize=yes galleryshowfilename=yes imagesperrow=7 gallerycaption=Galleries! ordermethod=sortkey order=ascending mode=gallery offset=12  Lists the 12th to the 34th pages in the file namespace that are also in category foo, formatting them into an image gallery, with the date they were added to category foo in the caption in year month day format, and having the images have a width of 70px

category
category lists categories to intersect. DynamicPageList will list pages that are found in every category listed. A minimum and maximum number of entries to list is set in the extension's source code. You may use magic words like August in the category name.

The syntax is

 category = Demo category = Demo 1 

notcategory
notcategory restricts the list of pages to those not in a particular category. You can use magic words like August in the category name.

 category   = Demo notcategory = Demo 1 

namespace
namespace restricts the list of pages specified above to those in a particular namespace, specified by name or number (see the List of default namespaces). Any invalid name is equivalent to the main article namespace.

 category = Demo namespace = Help 

redirects
redirects determines whether or not to include redirect pages. The value can be exclude (default, don't list redirects), include (list redirects), or ''only (don't list pages that aren't redirects).

 category = Demo redirects = only 

stablepages
stablepages determines whether or not to include stable (flagged) pages when using Extension:FlaggedRevisions. The value can be exclude (don't list), include (list stable and non-stable. default), or only (only list stable pages). Requires FlaggedRevs to be installed to work.

qualitypages
qualitypages determines whether or not to include quality (flagged at the 'pristine' level) pages when using Extension:FlaggedRevisions. The value can be exclude (don't list), include (list both quality and non-quality), or only (only list quality pages).

Note: the behaviour of qualitypages changed from older versions. In older versions qualitypages=exclude automatically made stablepages=only be set. This is no longer the case.

count
count restricts the number of results that are shown. By default, the pages added to the category most recently are shown (see order). Note that the extension will not list more results than the maximum defined in the extension source code.

 category = Demo count   = 2 

offset
offset starts the list from somewhere other than the first page on the list. For example, this can be used with count to make multi-column layouts.

 category = Demo offset   = 2 

Column demo

shownamespace
shownamespace displays the namespace in the page names. The value can be true (default, display in name: Help:Contents) or false (don't display in name: Contents).

 category     = Demo shownamespace = false </DynamicPageList>

addfirstcategorydate
addfirstcategorydate shows the date each article was added to category. The value can be true (display date), false (default, don't display date), or a date specifier (ymd, md, dm, dmy, mdy, and ISO 8601). If many categories are specified, it uses the first category. The linked page names are prepended with the date formatted according to your local MediaWiki date display preferences.

 category            = Demo addfirstcategorydate = true </DynamicPageList>

mode
mode determines the format of the list. The value can be unordered (bulleted list), ordered (numbered list), none (plain links with line breaks), gallery (image gallery, like &lt;gallery&gt;), inline (comma seperated list)

unordered:  category = Demo mode    = unordered </DynamicPageList>

ordered:  category = Demo mode    = ordered </DynamicPageList>

plain text:  category = Demo mode    = none </DynamicPageList>

inline:  category = Demo mode    = inline </DynamicPageList>

mode=gallery
Gallery is a special mode where the output is an image gallery. When using this mode, you would usually want to restrict the namespace to file.  category = Demo mode    = gallery namespace= file </DynamicPageList> Gallery mode also supports the options imagewidth (how wide the images should be in gallery, you may need to also set imageheight if using this), imageheight (how high the image should be) galleryshowfilesize (show the image size, like on category pages), galleryshowfilename (show filename like on category pages), imagesperrow (number of images per row in gallery), gallerycaption (caption for gallery).

If addfirstcategorydate is in use, the date is appended to the caption of the image.

Note, gallerycaption at the moment cannot accept links. (but it can accept things like August )

A complex gallery example might be:  count=20 namespace=file addfirstcategorydate=ymd imagewidth=70 galleryshowfilesize=yes galleryshowfilename=yes imagesperrow=7 gallerycaption=Look at my pretty gallery. mode=gallery </DynamicPageList>

suppresserrors
suppresserrors hides errors. The value can be true (hide errors) or false (default, show errors).

true:  category      = Dem suppresserrors = true </DynamicPageList>

false:  category      = Dem suppresserrors = false </DynamicPageList>

nofollow
nofollow sets  on the links. This prevents spiders from getting to the page through the link from the DynamicPageList. In general this is useless, as spiders will either be able to index the page from other links, or not at all due to robots.txt/$wgDefaultRobotPolicy. In general you should not use this option unless you know what you are doing, and have a good reason. The primary usecase is that on the English Wikinews, Google News considers anything linked from the main page to be an article.

 category      = Demo nofollow      = true </DynamicPageList>

googlehack
This is a hack for wikinews. Google News only considers articles with numbers in them to be news articles, so this appends ?dpl_id= to the end of the urls on the list. You shouldn't use this option unless you have a good reason to (however it won't hurt anything). This replaces the showcurid option that is no longer supported.

 category      = Demo googlehack      = true </DynamicPageList>

ordermethod
ordermethod determines the order and date to display. The value can be categoryadd (default, sort by date pages were categorised for first category) or lastedit (sort by date pages were last edit), length (article length), created (article creation date), categorysortkey (essentially alphabetical. order by the sort key of the first category. sortkey is an alias), popularity (by number of hits).

It should be noted, that lastedit really sorts by the last time the page was touched. In some cases this is not equivalent to the last edit (for example, this includes permission changes, creation or deletion of linked pages, and alteration of contained templates). popularity is only enabled on wikis that have $wgDisableCounters set to. As such it will not work on Wikimedia wikis. If you do not specify a category, some of these order methods will not work&mdash;specifically, categoryadd and categorysortkey fallback to created if there is no  clause.

 category            = Demo addfirstcategorydate = true ordermethod         = lastedit </DynamicPageList>

alphabetical example:

 category            = Demo ordermethod         = sortkey </DynamicPageList>

order
order decides the sort direction. The value can be descending (default, most recent to oldest) or ascending (oldest to most recent).

 category = Demo order    = ascending </DynamicPageList>

Templates
To use inside a template and pass parameters, use parser functions etc., use the  function:

The template page itself will display an error message because the category value is empty on the template page unless you put the template inside  tags. Example: Error: You need to include at least one category, or specify a namespace!

Derived extensions

 * Derived extensions: DPLforum outputs in forum style. Extension:GoogleNewsSitemap is like this but outputs an RSS feed. Extension:DynamicPageList (third-party) is a modified version with more features, but also more resource-expensive. Neither of the latter is used on Wikimedia's sites.
 * Version 1.8.4 of DynamicPageList (third-party) is fully downward compatible with the extension described here. So the way is open for a re-unification of the different development paths.
 * ''It is unclear if the above claim about DynamicPageList (third-party) is still true.