Extension:Substitutor

Description
Substitutor is a MediaWiki Extension that does one-time string substitution.

Common "magic words" in MediaWiki are replaced dynamically in MediaWiki. You would not want this dynamic behaviour with timestamps or unique strings / numbers / IDs, since they should be fixed after they were created.

This provides useful if you want to create unique names and URL's for "red links", or simply timestamp sites / changes.

Installation
Instead of downloading the zip archive you may also check this extension out via Git:

Usage
Simply put a string to substitute into your wikitext, like ___TIMESTAMP___.

It will be replaced after you saved the article, so the substitution will only happen exactly once.

Supported Substitutions

 * Current UNIX Timestamp
 * Random number between $wgSubstitutorMinRand and $wgSubstitutorMaxRand
 * Random string of length $wgSubstitutorRandStringLength
 * FakeID that should be unique. Consists of 0-9;a-z. (no guarantee however!)
 * Shorter FakeID that should be unique. Consists of 0-9;a-z; 6-8 characters. (no guarantee however!)

Options and their defaults
$wgSubstitutorMinRand          = 1000000000;

$wgSubstitutorMaxRand          = 9999999999;

$wgSubstitutorRandStringLength = 12;