I am planning on adding forum functionality to my wiki via extension. I'dd
first like to get comments from those of you more knowledgeable in regards
to php and MediaWiki. I would appreciate suggested modifications, or even
better, signs of support, so that I know that I'm not going about this in a
bassackwords way. Solutions to the problems at the bottom are especially
looked for. Here is my plan (which makes extensive use of subpages):
It would be called via something like <forum><forum>. This could be on talk
pages or main article pages. This will create a thread index, much like you
see with your normal VBulletin or PHPbb type forums. This page and all of
its subpages should then (desirably) be protected from editing.
Each thread would be a subpage of the the initial article. Each message
would be a subpage of the article. Each message would be included into the
thread page via template includes ( {{{{}}}} ).
So using 'Gatorade' as an example, we would have these potential addresses
(with Taste as a potential thread Title)...
Gatorade -The thread index
Gatorade/Taste -The Taste thread, containg all of the messages in this
thread
Gatorade/Taste/16 -The 16th message of the Taste thread, viewed by itself
or
Talk:Gatorade -The thread index
Talk:Gatorade/Taste -The Taste thread, containg all of the messages in
this thread
Talk:Gatorade/Taste/16 -The 16th message of the Taste thread, viewed by
itself
Some benefits of this system:
Requires very little modification to the main MediaWiki code. = Easy to
update MediaWiki in the future
It prevents people from making multiple threads with the same title. If
someone else came down a few months later and wanted to talk about 'Taste',
if they managed to avoid the 'Search' function they migh Possibly use the
same title as before, in whichcase they would get a warning about it and the
suggestion of adding on to the previous discussion if necessary.
It is easy to link to forums instead of the conventional way with urls like
:
http://someforum.somesite.com/viewtopic.php?t=138
http://someforum.somesite.com/viewforum.php?f=3&sid=e48431baee22f58e065…
and
http://someforum.somesite.com/index.php?s=3843d342de247afe550768eae06be2d2&…
It Doesn't require it's own db schema and content is fully integrated with
MediaWiki.
Some drawbacks:
Its a bit clunky because it doesn't have its own db schema.
There were some other ones, but I forgot them now :/
Here are some problems I know I will face when implementing this:
The disabling of directly editing a whole Namespace and only the namespace
or, all potential article subpages for one particular Article.
Preventing each edit or new message from showing up on recent changes and
instead have a more Customized Recent Changes Message like 'Talk:Gatorade :
Loplin posted a reply in the Taste thread.'
Again, comments are appreciated.
Thanks
Nathan Spaeth
--
If you have a penny and I have a penny, and we exchange pennies, we both
have one penny but if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange
ideas, then, we will both have two ideas.