Extension:Dynamic Article List for PHP4

Maintainer
Shannon McNaught (smcnaught) - I am also available on irc.chekmate.org #MediaWiki

Homepage
ChekMate Technical Focus Group

License
Copyright (C) 2005 Shannon McNaught

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Introduction
Original Code by: Zengji (11:41, 13 December 2005)

DynamicArticleList is a MediaWiki 1.5 extension. It is designed to provide add-on sort ability among all posted articles. Now five types of Dynamic Article List have been implemented. User could easily find the latest or most popular topics cross site with the help of Dynamic Article List.
 * 1) Newly Posted Articles
 * 2) Recently Updated Articles
 * 3) Recent Discussions
 * 4) Most Popular Articles
 * 5) Recent BLOG Entries

Note: Most up to date version of this extension can be found at: http://www.chekmate.org/wiki/index.php/Projects

This extension is written with the help from Dynamic Page List on the MediaWiki extensions area.

Prerequisite

 * This version works with PHP4 or higher
 * Dynamic Article List strongly depends on "recentchanges" table, however MediaWiki engine 1.5.0 preiodically flushes old entries from the "recentchanges" table. It's recommended to disable the auto-deletion feature. - Open  Article.php  in "includes" folder, comment the line "$dbw->query( $sql )" at the start of function "editUpdates".

Installation

 * Copy  DynamicArticleList.php  to "extensions" folder.
 * Add a line  require_once( "extensions/DynamicArticleList.php" );  into "LocalSettings.php".

Tag and its Parameters
Note:
 * "categoryRoot" has been removed to work with PHP4
 * All articles will be candidates.
 * The value of parameter "type" could be one of the following (default is  new ):
 * new => Newly Posted Articles
 * update => Recently Updated Articles
 * discussion => Recent Discussions
 * hot => Most Popular Articles
 * blog => Recent BLOG Entries
 * The default value of "count" is  5 .

Samples
A sample snapshot of Dynamic Article List is shown below.  title=Newly Posted Articles type=new count=5 

When "type" is set to  new , The output record format would be  Page Title (author) - [create time]  When "type" is set to  update  or  discussion , The output record format would be  Page Title (last editor) - [update time] 

The underlaying wiki codes are:  title=Newly Posted Articles type=new count=5 

Another sample snapshot of Dynamic Article List is shown below.  title=Most Popular Articles type=hot count=5 

When "type" is set to  hot , The output record format would be  Page Title - (accessed times) 

The underlaying wiki codes are:  title=Most Popular Articles type=hot count=5 

Other sites using this extension

 * ChekMate Technical Focus Group
 * ClickToNews.com
 * PaymentMerchant.com
 * GameShift.com
 * GoGoTraffic.com
 * BigBTV.com
 * Wikimanga.net