MediaWiki/archive/customizing

navbar

Available MediaWiki extensions which look like they could be useful:

portal-type features:
- My blog: blogging features
- Tasks extension and Tasks Extension: rudimentary multi-user project management
- WikiFeeds adds to the standard feeds: Newest pages, Recent changes by user, Newest pages by user, User watchlist, Recent changes for articles in a category, Newest articles in a category
data display:
- syntax highlighting
  - Syntax Highlighting Extension: requires Beautifier Syntax Highlighting Engine
  - GeSHiCodeTag Extension
- TabbedData extension: useful for directly posting spreadsheets, though formatting may not be as nice as the converter; evaluation needed
data management:
- Attribute Extension: adds an "attribute" tab to all pages; stores attribute data in a table
groups / security:
convenience:
- Special:Interwiki by Stephanie Amanda Stevens (phroziac)
experimental (keep an eye on these to see if they become useful):
- Extension:WikiDB creates virtual tables within the wiki and lets you output their contents dynamically
- Extension:Semantic MediaWiki

(From Woozle 20:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT). Eventually to be given their own section, I expect.)

Everything obviously starts with index.php
For the purpose of displaying a page (not saving changes or doing anything else), this calls $wgArticle->view(), in Article.php (line 699)
$wgArticle->view() appears to be able to provide a few other formats besides the regular view (including difference engine and displaying redirections as subtitles), but I'm ignoring that for now
$wgOut seems to be the object which accumulates text to be output, via various methods:
- $wgOut->addWikiText(...)
- $wgOut->addHTML(...)
- $wgOut->addPrimaryWikiText() # Display content and save to parser cache
- $wgOut->addWikiText() # Display content, don't attempt to save to parser cache
- $wgOut->setPageTitle()
- $wgOut->transformBuffer(); # Put link titles into the link cache
- $wgOut->addMetaTags(); # Add link titles as META keywords
...and then it does these two lines:
- $this->viewUpdates(); (found at line 1926 -- doesn't do much)
- wfProfileOut( $fname );
It's not clear whether the navbar has already been pulled in by the time we hit viewUpdates -- possibly transformBuffer does it? The comment makes it sound like that, but the name "transformBuffer" in that case is not very descriptive. The code in there should probably be examined.