Extension:Glossary

Related Extensions
An alternative version of this extension can be found at Extension:Terminology

What can this extension do?
Ever been reading a technical article with lots and lots of acronyms? Unless you know all the terminology they are using, it can be really frustrating trying to understand what the author means.

This extension allows wiki authors to define a list of acronyms and their definitions on a special page. Whenever that acronym is found, it will be highlighted and mousing over it will reveal the definition in a tooltip.

Additionally, using Walter Zorn's "JavaScript, DHTML Tooltips" library (found at: http://www.walterzorn.com/tooltip/tooltip_e.htm ) you can customize the appearance of the tooltips.

Usage
By default, the page "Glossary" without a namespace will be used as the source of acronyms and their definitions. It's also possible to modify the extension to put the definitions in a protected namespace.

Installation
Just checkout the code from the svn to /extensions/Glossary/

LocalSettings.php
2. Add the following to the end of your LocalSettings.php:

3. Create the page "Glossary"

4. Add one line to this page for each acronym. Each line should start with a ';' (semicolon), then the text to be replaced followed by a ':' (colon) followed by the text to replace it with.

Sample Glossary

 * FTP:File Transport Protocol
 * AAAAA:American Association Against Acronym Abuse
 * ACK:Acknowledge
 * AFAIK:As Far As I Know
 * AWGTHTGTATA:Are We Going To Have To Go Through All This Again
 * HTTP:HyperText Transfer Protocol

ToolTip
This extension will not work without the tooltip javascript library. Download wz_tooltip.zip and unpack it into a directory called extensions/tooltip.

Parameters
To lock down the glossary, modify the glossary.php file.

Find the line:

and change it to:

The Glossary will now be located at:

MediaWiki:Glossary

Alternatively to use a different Glossary page within each namespace, change this line to: This will look at the NameSpace:Glossary page for all pages in NameSpace and NameSpace_Talk (assuming you have set any custom namespaces up following the convention of even numbers for the namespace and the following odd numbers for the corresponding talk namespaces).

Known problems
Glossary terms within certain page are NOT found when you use fulltext search. For example if your glossary term is "CDS" and in specific page "CDS - consolidated data store" is this term used, searching this term will not find anything. As of version 5.0 of the tooltip javascript library, the tooltips get "stuck" on the cursor. $span->setAttribute('onmouseout', 'UnTip');
 * 1) Open Glossary.php in a text editor
 * 2) Find line 88: $span->setAttribute('onmouseover', "TagToTip('$term')");
 * 3) Add a new line after it: