Wikilog

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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

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.

Installation

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

# Minimal configuration
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.