Extension:BedellPenDragon

The BedellPenDragon extension is like a combination of Extension:Random In Category and the example page_props metadata extension. It may as well have been called the BastardChild extension. The extension adds a tag extension and parserfunctions to allow pages to add or remove metadata to/from the page_props table. It is designed to be used in conjunction with Extension:CategoryGallery and Extension:RecentPages, the latter of which is another hacky, inelegant, poorly-documented extension, full of superfluous and usually unindexed database queries, from the author who brought you Extension:FrontBackMatterForcedWikilinks, an extension that is only slightly less useful than Extension:Awesomeness, but has a more cumbersome compound name that is similar to something out of the Finnish language. Having said all that, the alternatives to using this extension are even worse, so you better install it and make the best of it.

Download BedellPenDragon

 * Create a folder in the extensions folder named BedellPenDragon
 * Move the files to the extensions/BedellPenDragon/ folder

Configuration
There are no configuration settings. You were bad, so your configuration privileges have been taken away until further notice. Maybe this will give you some time to rethink your behavior.

Usage
The most obvious uses of this extension are as follows:

Random page in category
To get the page title of a random page in Category:Aubry, use: 

"New Pages" or "Did You Know" descriptions via metadata from the pages themselves (requires RecentPages extension)
You'll need Extension:RecentPages for this.

PageSummary template and New Pages display of pages with that template
You probably want to create a page summary template (Template:PageSummary) like this: That way, you can write your wiki pages like this (making sure to leave out ref tags, because the extension can't handle them properly; I tried but failed to get it ignore them):



Notice how this creates two summaries separated by a pipe; the short summary is the first sentence, while the long summary is the rest. You can then use the Recent Pages extension to create something like this, which you'll put in, e.g. Template:New articles at PolyWiki‎: 

This will produce a result like this, when inserted into the appropriate main page template (e.g. one you can borrow from Main page):



List of new unsummarized articles
You then want to create a PolyWiki:New articles without summaries:

The following is a list of new articles in need of summaries: 

You will get a result like this:



CategoryGallery with captions generated from image description files (requires CategoryGallery extension)
You'll need Extension:CategoryGallery for this. Place image descriptions on your image file pages (e.g. File:Popsicle stick Eiffel Tower.jpg) using the same PageSummary template as before. Now, on the page where you're putting the gallery, use e.g.:



The result is as follows (note how the captions are generated using the metadata you saved on each image page):