MediaWiki/archive/customizing

Techniques: Software: MediaWiki: Customization

Modifications

Modifying the Menus

The text which shows up in the menu bar (at left in monobook) may be edited through the wiki itself. What you need to know is the name for each link. To edit the contents, you navigate to the page named MediaWiki:linkname. You will need to be a sysop in order to edit the text. To get a list of links and other text which can be customized, go to Special:Allpages (on the wiki in question), select "MediaWiki" from the "namespaces" drop-down, and press "Go".

Questions

• Where does the text for the corresponding pop-up hint come from, and

can it be modified?

• Can more links be added to the existing navigation box?
• How do you add another box? (e.g. to have links back to the site of

which the wiki is a companion)

Code Notes

(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:

• • $wgOut->$wgOut->addWikiText(...)
  • $wgOut->$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.