[Wikipedia-l] Wikiforum

Tue Jan 25 15:17:11 UTC 2005

Hi all,
Thanks to Amgine, the Wikiforum extension is now testable 24/7 on his 
server [1]. This extension was asked by many French users to replace (at 
least partly) hand organized French Village Pump (the hell for those who 
try to keep it legible!). In fact, the extension is really more "wiki" 
than "forum". This is just a special page (special:forum) that maintain 
a list of the latest edited pages into a new "thread" namespace.

Features:
- The X latest threads are fully included into the forum's page (20 on 
the test server).
- The Y next threads are listed as links into the forum's page (30 on 
the test server).
- All the threads are listed into "All pages" special page.
- Threads are created via a special page accessible from the forum's page.
- Threads pages are pure Wiki pages that can be moved, watched, 
protected, categorized, etc. like all other pages.
- Mostly all the forum page rendering is done via CSS, so it can be 
customized "per project" and "per user" (via personal CSS).
- Multilinguage interface: Actually English, French and Japanese, but 
any other language can be added easily. Test server is set as English so 
the interface is also in (bad) English.
- Only one SQL request.

I'll fix many small things, but I don't plane to code more advanced 
features.
Any suggestions, proposals, opinions, criticisms are welcomed, but keep 
in mind this is an extension designed to be independent to Mediawiki and 
that more advance features (like get the creation date or the total 
number of edits per thread) may really decrease performance.

As I said in introduction, the goal is to add it (at least) on French 
Wikipedia as soon as developers agreed. So please check it!

Aoineko

[1] http://test-wikipedia.saewyc.net/index.php/Special:Forum

PS: I didn't put the last version on CVS because I'm rewriting CSS 
elements in a more elegant way.