[Mediawiki-l] User Variable for Use in Templates

Mon Feb 6 13:18:11 UTC 2006

MediaWiki can co-operate with external server-side caching mechanisms
such as squid, etc. or maintain an internal parser cache of pages,
which reduces the load on the server somewhat, given that the markup
for a page no longer needs to be parsed upon each hit.

Introducing a variable like {{USERNAME}} would interfere with this
mechanism to some extent. Having said that, I doubt even the senior
developers can keep full track of what's cached when and where, so
it's possible that I'm not quite correct in thinking this. However,
evaluating the feature requests, and considering the caching to date,
it makes sense to me that this would interfere with server-side
caching.

All the above considered, if your wiki is a smaller one, it may be
possible to hack in some workarounds and/or hack in this variable and
disable the parser cache.

It's not *all* cut and dried. ;-)

Rob Church

On 06/02/06, Stéphane Thibault <thibault.stephane at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> > We don't have a {{USERNAME}} variable. It's been requested about 3
> > times, and each request has been rejected for a good reason; it would
> > defeat page caching completely. This would not be helpful.
> > Rob Church
>
> With my level of technical knowledge, I'm not exactly sure why this
> would defeat page caching. Do you have a link or two to suggest so I
> would understand better what's at stake here.
>
> I was really planning on relying heavily on this template for the
> design of the wiki I manage and I wouldn't want to hack something in
> that might cause more problems than it solves...
>
> Thanks,
> Stéphane
>
>
> > On 04/02/06, Stéphane Thibault wrote:
> >
> >> Hey guys, here's what I'm trying to do.
> >>
> >> I'm setting up a MediaWiki website for a scientific association and
> >> instead of relying only on collaborative writing, it's also important
> >> that members be allowed to write "signed" articles on a subject that
> >> may already exist.
> >>
> >> What I'd like to do is include a string in the
> >> [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]] that would allow the user to create the
> >> desired article after a failed search, redirecting him to this page:
> >>
> >> User:Username/Article
> >>
> >> The original article page would then act as a disambiguation page
> >> listing all articles written on a particular topic.
> >>
> >> It should be simple enough but I just can't find the proper variable
> >> to use for the username in my template. I looked at theses pages:
> >>
> >> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable
> >> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words
> >>
> >> but couldn't find what I'm looking for. Any hints? Is there a built
> >> in template maybe for "wgUser"? Or maybe even a simpler way to
> >> achieve this goal?
> >>
> >> I originally posted my question over here if anyone's interested on
> >> this topic:
> >> http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=999
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Stéphane
> >>
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