Difference between revisions of "Wikilog"

Revision as of 17:32, 10 October 2013

Wikilog is a MediaWiki extension.

• Main purpose: Heavily improved blog and forum system for MediaWiki with hierarchical comments and other features.
• Repository: https://github.com/mediawiki4intranet/Wikilog
• Homepage: Wikilog on mediawiki.org 
• Compatible MediaWiki versions: guaranteed 1.18-mw4i, 1.19-1.21, maybe others
• License: GPLv2.0+ 
• Created: 2008-09-12 
• Last version: 2013-10-10 
• Our rating: Definitely useful (5)

Status for Mediawiki4Intranet distribution:

• Inclusion date: 2009-07-08
• Included version: newest available
• Improvement status: Forked in MediaWiki4Intranet with major improvements

Wikilog is a MediaWiki extension that enhances the wiki software with some common blogging features, making it a wiki-blog-forum hybrid.

This is a version heavily modified by Mediawiki4Intranet project. Version control access and issue tracking are available on github:

• https://github.com/mediawiki4intranet/Wikilog

Information about previous versions can be found on:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikilog
• http://groups.google.com/group/mediawiki-wikilog

Usage

Quickstart:

• Install the extension and configure the Blog namespace (see below).
• Create a blog: for example, go to Blog:My_blog article and put any content on it. This will be your blog header.
• Create a post:
  • Click «Wikilog» tab in the top.
  • Enter the post title and click «Create» button.
  • Enter the post content, mark «Publish» checkbox and save the article.
• Comment on a post:
  • Go to Blog:My_blog
  • Click «0 comments»
  • Enter comment text in the editbox and click «Post comment»

Advanced tips:

• Add link to <your_wiki>/Special:Wikilog?view=archives&show=published&sort=wlp_talk_updated&desc=1 in your MediaWiki:Sidebar with «WikiForum» title to get a forum view. Or you can just select «Archives» and sort by «Talk updated» column.
• Go to Special:Wikilog to view all blog posts interleaved. You can subscribe to them via RSS/Atom, and you can subscribe to them by email in Preferences.
• Apply some filters on Special:Wikilog (author, date, wikilog, category…)
• Go to Special:WikilogComments to view all comments. You can subscribe to all comments via RSS/Atom. You can also subscribe to them by email in Preferences.
• Go to the main page of a blog, click «Discussion» tab — you’ll see all comments to that blog and also subscribe to them via RSS/Atom.
• Enable Wikilog-style comments on normal pages ($wgWikilogCommentNamespaces = true;). You'll receive email notifications if that page is on your watchlist.

Our improvements

Our Wikilog version is heavily improved; there is a lot of new big features:

• «Forum» view — i.e. sorting of entries by the date of last comment in «archives» mode, and unread comment count tracking

  Add link to <your_wiki>/Special:Wikilog?view=archives&show=published&sort=wlp_talk_updated&desc=1 in your MediaWiki:Sidebar with «WikiForum» title to get a forum view.

• (!) Wikilog-style hierarchical talk support for normal pages, not just for the blogs.
• Comment email notifications
• New blog entry email notifications for main blog page watchers
• RSS/Atom comment feeds
• Subscribing/unsubscribing to all comments in a blog, or even in all blogs in a wiki (the last is a user preference)
• New post creation form on Special:Wikilog (in the «blog agregator»)
• Drop-down lists for wikilog/author/category fields on Special:Wikilog
• Post calendar for MediaWiki:Sidebar

  Add «* wikilogcalendar» to MediaWiki:Sidebar to enable it

• Automatic folding of non-branching comments to the linear view — this prevents too many nesting levels without any loss of hierarchy
• Improved binary encoding of materialized paths to comments, allowing to store up to 250 nesting levels, versus 36 in old Wikilog
• Pagination which never breaks discussion threads
• Experimental support for importing dumps from blogger.com
• Various bug fixes

The localisation was of course broken in the meantime — there is full support only for English and Russian :)

TODO

• Try to structurize improvements and send them to upstream, or just become the real upstream, because the original author has stopped the development.

  I suppose it would be very hard to push changes via Gerrit because the review process takes incredibly long times.

• Optimize comment pages performance

  Maybe it would be good to remove comments from Wikilog at all, and implement them as a separate TreeTalk extension storing all comments on a single page instead of separate pages for all comments — it would work much faster. But maybe it’s not needed.

• Check IntraACL compatibility — i.e. check that rights for individual pages/comments/blogs don’t break anything.

Installation

Requires DB update. First add the following into your LocalSettings.php:

# Minimal configuration
# 100 must be the first unused in your wiki namespace number
require_once "$IP/extensions/Wikilog/Wikilog.php";
Wikilog::setupBlogNamespace(100);
 
# You can enable search in Wikilog namespace by default
$wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault[NS_BLOG] = 1;
 
# Then you can override some settings from WikilogDefaultSettings.php
# Not all of them are listed here, just the basic ones

# Default number of articles to list in the wikilog front page and in
$wgWikilogNumArticles = 20;
 
# Default number of comments to list in wikilog comment pages.
$wgWikilogNumComments = 50;
 
# This should be >= either of previous two settings
$wgWikilogExpensiveLimit = 100;
 
# Publish new articles by default.
$wgWikilogSignAndPublishDefault = false;
 
# Set to array(NS_TALK => true, NS_<something>_TALK => true)
# to enable threaded Wikilog-style comments in these namespaces.
#
# Set to boolean 'true' to enable such comments in ALL Talk namespaces.
$wgWikilogCommentNamespaces = array();
 
# Date format to use for entries and comments
# Should be set to one of MW date format options, for example 'ymd hms'
# (see $datePreferences in languages/messages/Messages??.php)
$wgWikilogPagerDateFormat = 'ymd hms';
 
# Default value for "not in category" field
# You can set for example to some "Hidden" category so your users
# can "soft-hide" some of their entries in the aggregated view
$wgWikilogDefaultNotCategory = false;
 
# Show existing comments on each item page just below the post content
# Turn off with 'false'
$wgWikilogCommentsOnItemPage = true;

And then run php maintenance/update.php to apply DB changes.

Requirements

• MediaWiki 1.19-1.21 or higher, or Mediawiki4Intranet 1.18.
• A MySQL database backend.

Upgrading

Always run php maintenance/update.php when you're updating Wikilog. Some of the updates may not need it, bun an extra run will never harm :)

If you are upgrading from one of previous versions of Wikilog, you should also run

 php maintenance/patchSql.php extensions/Wikilog/archives/fill-wikilog-comment-meta.sql

in your Wiki document root. This command should be only run once.