On Jan 24, 2008 3:30 AM, Timothy Chen <tnachen(a)u.washington.edu> wrote:
One of the problem I have now is that I want to change
the order of topics
in each article depending on the user who views it.
Since each article represents a network device, and each topic represents a
network problem, I want to sort the problems depending on the user network
device background information and user input device background information.
I don't know if this sounds too vague, or I'm even at the right place to ask
this.
But I wonder if you guys can give me a direction where to start looking
about adding this type of logic?
MediaWiki does not currently have any explicit facility for in-wiki
creation of "wizards" or any other kind of adaptive page. Pages are
static or very close to it, and definitely cannot vary by user. You
may be able to use the quasi-programming-language features of
MediaWiki and some of its extensions to obtain something close to what
you want, but those are difficult for an average person to understand,
and so you'll lose a lot of the point of creating a wiki (low barrier
to contribution).
My recommendation would be that you use the features of standard HTML,
i.e., hyperlinks, and have a page for each possibility, with links in
between pages. If this is *really* not sufficient for your needs, my
recommendation would be to investigate extensions to MediaWiki and
other wiki packages entirely to see if they do what you want. If none
does, you can consider writing an extension.
You *could* probably work up some complicated system for every page
using parser functions and variables within MediaWiki itself, but if
you're already programming you may as well program in something
approaching a real language, do it once instead of repeating it for
every page, and do it in a way that non-programmers can contribute to
-- i.e., write an extension.