Extension:Wikilog/Features
Some of the most important user-visible Wikilog features:
- Multiple blogs/wikilogs: There is no limit to the number of wikilogs that can be hosted in a single MediaWiki+Wikilog installation. New wikilogs are created by simply creating a new page in a specific namespace. There is no need to modify the wiki configuration in order to create new wikilogs.
- Multiple namespaces: Usually, only one wikilog namespace is enough, but the extension still allows the wiki administrator to configure as many different namespaces as necessary to contain wikilogs. This allows some degree of flexibility in configuration. For example, one namespace for informal user blogs and another for official site news.
- Wiki familiarity: Wikilogs and wikilog articles are just wiki pages with some added functionality. This means that all features available to wiki pages are automatically available to wikilogs too. This includes: wiki syntax, edit history, multiple categories, talk pages, page protection, etc. It is possible to make some creative use of these features with wikilogs; for example, a wiki family can have sibling wikilogs in different languages, linked together via interwiki links.
- Multiple authors per article: In most blog software, posts are usually written by a single author. Wiki software, on the other hand, is all about collaborative writing. Wikilog follows the wiki philosophy and allows articles to be written and signed by multiple authors. All authors are listed together in the resulting article.
- Enhanced commenting interface: Standard MediaWiki talk pages are very flexible in terms of the allowed formatting, but at the same time they are completely unstructured. They are very far from being user-friendly. Most blog software, on the other hand, provide a simple and straightforward article commenting interface that allows visitors to leave comments without much hassle. Wikilog enhances its articles talk pages with a commenting interface that is similar to blogs, in that visitors are more comfortable in leaving comments, but also familiar to wiki users, in that discussion threading is supported.
- Syndication feeds:
A fundamental feature found in all blog software, is also automatically handled by Wikilog. Each wikilog has its own Atom and RSS feeds. Advanced features are supported, like feed images, icons, subtitles and descriptions. - Article summary: It is possible to define part of the text of a wikilog article to be its summary. The summary will be displayed in wikilog listings instead of the full article text. If a summary is not selected, the extension automatically takes all the text up to the first heading in the article text as its summary.
- Article tags: MediaWiki provides categories that aid in grouping wiki pages about related topics, and Wikilog incentives its use also with wikilog articles. But categories alone are a somewhat formal classification system (a category demands its own page in the
Category:namespace in order to be considered complete). Wikilog offers article tags as an additional, more informal classification system exclusive to wikilog articles. This feature is disabled by default, it can be enabled during installation. - Advanced querying: It is possible to query and list wikilog articles through the
Special:Wikilogspecial page provided by the extension. Many different criteria are available for querying: wikilog, category, author, tags, date and status. - Wikilog embedding: Wikilog listings can be embedded in other pages through
Special:Wikilogspecial page transclusion. This allows, for example, to create a "site news" box in the wiki's main page or a "user posts" in a user's page, that lists the last few articles in any wikilog of one's choice. It is possible to use templates to format how articles will be listed.
Other design features:
- Caching: The extension was carefully designed to make good use (and not simply disable) MediaWiki's parser cache system. Even though wikilog pages contain dynamic lists of the articles in them, these pages are cached so that they can be served with reduced server processing and performance impact. Syndication feeds are also cached.