Help:MediaWiki extensions
From semantic-mediawiki.org
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Basic extensions |
Various extensions of MediaWiki are particularly useful in combination with Semantic MediaWiki:
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Admin Links
Admin Links provides a special page that contains links for tasks that administrators are likely to perform. Anyone can view the page, but administrators get a link to it added to their "user links", usually at the top of each page; so that the Admin Links page can serve as somewhat of a "control panel" for the wiki. Other extensions can add their own links to this page. The Admin Links extension is especially helpful for Semantic MediaWiki-based sites because SMW and some of its related extensions are set up to add their own links, letting the page serve as a control panel for SMW-based tasks as well.
Author: Yaron Koren
First released: May 2009
Links:
Configure
Configure lets administrators edit the configuration variables that are normally set within LocalSettings.php via the wiki instead. This can make administration easier, especially for those without login access to the server their wiki resides on. Semantic MediaWiki and some of its related extensions are covered by Configure.
Author: IAlex
First released: April 2008
Deployment Framework
The Deployment Framework extension enables the convenient administration and automatic setup of extensions for MW and SMW (comparable to APT). The deployment framework can also download and apply the latest patches of installed extensions.
Authors: ontoprise GmbH
First released: October 2009
External Data
External Data allows wiki pages to get data from various external sources, and use it on the page. The sources can be external URLs that contains data in XML, CSV or JSON formats; LDAP servers; or relational databases (provided one has the password). This allows, among other things, one Semantic MediaWiki-based site to use the semantic data from another, by using the CSV format of inline queries.
Authors: Yaron Koren, Michael Dale and David Macdonald
First released: January 2009
Links:
Header Tabs
Another extension useful with semantic templates is Header Tabs, which allows for a tabbed interface to split up a page (or a form - see Semantic Forms) into more manageable sections.
Author: Sergey Chernyshev
First released: March 2008
Links:
- An example of tabs in action
- List of sites using Header Tabs
- Semantic Communities development mailing list, covering this extension and other technology
Page Object Model
Page Object Model (POM) provides an API for editing the contents of template calls within pages remotely. For those wikis that store SMW data via templates, this provides a way for outside applications to modify the data.
Author: Sergey Chernyshev
First released: January 2008
ParserFunctions
Semantic templates are a method for further simplifying the use of semantic annotations. However, since omitted template parameters cannot be annotated, it is useful to have some support for conditionals within the wiki. This is supplied by the ParserFunctions extension.
Author: Tim Starling
First released: April 2006
Replace Text
Replace Text provides a form for administrators to do a text search-and-replace across all pages on their wiki, including both page contents and page names. For Semantic MediaWiki, this is especially useful when the names or values of properties, or the names or fields of templates, get changed: if such a change requires corresponding changes to many existing wiki pages, this extension allows you to do that in one step.
Author: Yaron Koren
First released: April 2008
VariablesExtension
The VariablesExtension lets you create and read local variables on a wiki page. This is especially helpful for re-using statements on a page without having to duplicate them everytime. For instance you can store a lengthy ASK query in a variable and re-use this later on with different output formats.
Widgets
Widgets is another very helpful extension in conjunction with semantic templates. It allows for the creation of custom HTML from passed-in variables, which can be used to display videos, audio, images, RSS feeds, maps, calendars and other external data, custom Javascript, and any other HTML for which the current set of wiki-text and string and parser functions is not suitable. And it is structured as a parser function, which means that it can take in template variables (some of this functionality is already available in other MediaWiki extensions, but many of them are tag extensions, which means that they can only take in hardcoded values). The Widgets homepage also contains a large set of ready-to-use widgets, which will work simply by being copied and pasted into one's wiki.
Author: Sergey Chernyshev
First released: February 2008
Links:
