I’m a big fan of wikis and MediaWiki is my flavour. It’s a rock solid platform and has never let me down. I’ve picked up lots of best practices, patterns, tips & tricks and little hacks over the past few years and I’ll be sharing them with you over the next few months on this blog. There’s no better place to start things rolling than with a list of my favourite extensions. Extensions are what bring the MediaWiki to life and really allow you to take control of your Wiki content:

1. Semantic MediaWiki has to come top of this list. To me it is the killer-extension on MediaWiki today. By assigning meta data to your pages you can really slice and dice your content. You can put your content modelling hat on and generate dynamic content, generating pages from contact lists of your team to glossaries to page tagging. It ensures that you only need to enter content once, allows you create different views of the system and really get to grips your content. All that you’d expect from a Semantic web. To top it off the Semantic Media Wiki team have slowly but surely reached the v1 of the extension over the past year or so, maintaining a high level of quality at all times.
2. Next up is InputBox. Very simple, but elegant extension that allows you to create a new page from a template. If you need to create many pages of the same form, such as system requirements, then create a template from which you can spin off all the pages. Great for encouraging a standard page structure and makes it a lot easier for new comers to the wiki to follow a prescribed work-flow.
3. Next 4 are some core function libraries that you’ll benefit from on a day-to-day basis as you create ever more sophisticated templates. StringFunctions gives you string replace and substring functions among others.
4. ParserFunctions gives you such functions as if, ifeq and switch.
5. VariableExtensions allows you access previously set variables, allowing you to do counters or interact between templates.
6. I know I shouldn’t, but DynamicFunctions does give you that extra control of URL parameters. Dirty and hacky at times, but it has allowed me to go that extra distance at time, when it’s the last resort.
7. You should always reference your sources. To help you manage your references and collect them all up nicely up at the bottom of the page try Cite.
8. Gadgets looks really promising by allowing a little customisation / go-faster stripes on your wiki. A gadget is essentially a JavaScript and/or CSS which is applied to your page. Sysop users can install new gadgets using the standard wiki interface and then any user can choose (via a preferences edit) which gadgets they want to. There’s many out there and the list seems to be growing all the time. I said this is promising, because although I found a few interesting such as the pop-up preview on hover over links or WY(sort of)SIWYG, I couldn’t find any that really assisted on a day-to-day basis and, more importantly, enough to recommend to users of the wikis I manage. I suspect this’ll change soon as I discover new and improved gadgets.
9. Eye-candy is good - especially when it makes things more usable. This is what SyntaxHighlight does. It brings those code blocks to life with some decent colouring, making them oh-so-much clearer. And what a fantastic list of supported languages.
10. I leave Semantic Forms to last to end on a high, no means because I value it any less that of the ones above. Semantic Forms allows you to create forms for your data entry. With this in place users don’t even need to write any more wiki text to create pages - in fact you can enforce that they don’t so you really have control over how specific page types get managed. It integrates so well with the Semantic Media Wiki it surprises you. For example it can autocomplete text fields with a slick JavaScript module that lists best fit data as you type. This extension essentially wraps up a lot of the extensions mentioned above to improve the UI and protect the normal user from the sometimes cryptic wiki language.

One thing that always amazes me is the quality of both the MediaWiki core and the extensions provided by the community. It’s always a pleasure to come to either install a MediaWiki system, install extensions or upgrade the stack. It all just works and when I slip up (as I occasionally do) - it invariably tells me what I’ve done and what I need to do.

I’ll continue with this MediaWiki series in a few weeks time. Please let me know if there’s any particular areas you’d like me to cover or perhaps any use cases or samples you’d like me to run through.

Related articles

• Bugzilla Reports for MediaWiki
• Step by Step : Create a Firefox Search Plugin for Your MediaWiki

Tags: mediawiki

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 12:07 am by Ian Homer and is filed under mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.