Extension:Collection

Overview
This extension allows a user to organize personal selections of pages in a collection. Collections can be
 * edited & structured using chapters
 * persisted & loaded, shared
 * rendered as PDF (see Extension:PDF_Writer)
 * exported as ODF Text Document (see Extension:OpenDocument_Export)
 * exported as DocBook XML (see Extension:XML_Bridge)
 * ordered as a printed book at http://pediapress.com/

See this press release Wikis Go Printable for more information on this project.

Documentation & Support
See the included README.txt.

There is also a Google group for support and discussion of mwlib, mwlib.rl and the Collection extension.

mwlib developers have also been spotted on the pediapress IRC channel:
 * Server: irc.freenode.net
 * Channel: #pediapress

Help improving the extension
If you want to help to make the extension better, you can do several things:


 * Add your idea or feature request to this Wishlist
 * If you find a bug or have a feature request, open a ticket in the bug tracker.
 * Fix/add translations using Betawiki.
 * If you know PHP/HTML/JavaScript/CSS, you can send patches with fixes or improvements to the mwlib mailinglist or attach them to tickets in the bug tracker.
 * If you're a Python hacker, you can help improving mwlib and mwlib.rl – the Python libraries that are the "backbone" of the Collection extension.

Source
The Collection extension is copyrighted by PediaPress and is distributed under the GNU General Public License (see the included README.txt for details).

Current sources can be obtained from the official MediaWiki Subversion repository found at http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/. You can checkout a copy right into the extensions directory of your MediaWiki installation with the following commands (after installing Subversion):

cd extensions/ svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Collection

Please read the included README.txt for further installation and configuration of the extension.

Screenshot


See also: http://wikieducator.org/Help:Collections

Generating PDFs, OpenDocument- & DocBook-Exports
It's easy to enable PDF (ODF, DocBook) support with this Extension. It is configured by default to use the server http://tools.pediapress.com/. Therefore (low traffic) sites that are accessible from the internet don't need to install their own PDF Server.

Simply install and configure the Collection extension using the default value  http://tools.pediapress.com/cgi-bin/pdf-server.py  for $wgPDFServer (see README.txt of the Collection Extension for instructions) and make sure the MediaWiki API (api.php) is enabled on your MediaWiki installation.

No installation of Python, ReportLab, mwlib etc. required! Note however, that in order to use this service, your wiki must be accessible from the internet and must be either accessible for non-logged-in users or login credentials are configured (see README.txt for instructions).

If you either have a wiki which is not accessible from the outside or your site has high traffic, you need to install your own render server. The server is included with mwlib and can be used as a stand-alone HTTP server (which is the default protocol) or as FastCGI or SCGI server or as a CGI script.

Have a look at the [[Media:Solar system final.pdf|Solar system, example article]] from the English language Wikipedia, rendered as PDF using this technology.

Creating cross-wiki article collections
It's best to use http://pediapress.com/collection/ for this purpose, see ticket 408.

Related

 * Extension:PDF_Writer
 * Extension:XML_Bridge
 * Extension:OpenDocument_Export