Thread:User talk:Pastakhov/Some extension news that could perhaps be relevant to your goals for PhpTags

In case this might be helpful:

One of your goals was "a more flexible and fast alternative to semantic mediawiki". Some days ago, the developer Yaron Koren released the new extension Cargo, which is meant to be an alternative to SMW. (Announcement and discussion here.) I don't know how it compares to your vision, but it may be worth taking a look at. If it's a reasonably close match, I thought it might be useful to know about.

I've considered using it myself, but will wait for a while and see how it develops. But in short, the Cargo extension is:
 * Much smaller and simpler than SMW, but capable of most of what SMW + several extensions are.
 * Templates are simultaneously used for:
 * Defining data tables. A wiki admin can perform a new action on such a page to generate the DB tables to be used for storage.
 * Storing data into these tables by using the templates on pages.
 * Querying works like "a thin wrapper around SQL", using the tables defined.
 * Various interface elements are provided, based mostly on earlier extensions for SMW. That includes display formats for query results, as well as special pages for browsing data stored in a wiki.

It is also meant to be used with Semantic Forms, which no longer is dependent on SMW, and in the latest git version has additional support for Cargo data.

By the way, I've found Semantic Forms convenient to use together with PhpTags. Custom editing forms handle the use of templates on pages, and the templates can use PhpTags.

(As for CodeMirror, I currently don't use it, mainly because it doesn't work in Semantic Forms forms that use WikiEditor. This might simply be the known general problem for extensions that add things to WikiEditor. SF does not use, but rather other identifiers. From a search, perhaps this could be useful if you are interested in adding support for SF in CM. However, one note regarding SF-related testing in MediaWiki-Vagrant, in case the following would also happen for you: I get strange JS errors with SF + WikiEditor that only happen on the MediaWiki-Vagrant setup.)

Also, an update on what I've been doing with PhpTags:

It is now in use on a wiki. The "Sortkey" PhpTags template automatically sets the sort key based on transforming a page title. Then there is one that stores an external link (with additional data: description, etc.) in a PHP array each time it is used. Another which is related is used once on a page to print the array contents as an "External links" section, if non-empty. (The point of this is to fill in the data when editing in Semantic Forms, and then show it on the page with standardized formatting.)

As for PhpTags SMW, I've gone slowly with it, working on and off to make something better for it to be a wrapper around than the old Semantic Query Interface extension. Ideas have recently developed and we'll see how it turns out as I work on it.