README for the News extension Copyright © 2007 Daniel Kinzler Licenses: GNU General Public Licence (GPL)

GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

The News extension allows a custom excerpt from Special:Recentchanges to be included on a wiki page, or to be published as an RSS or Atom feed. It supports several types of filtering as well as full custom formating of entries, using template syntax.

https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:News

The News extension was originally written by Daniel Kinzler in 2007 and is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

Note that the functionality of this extension overlaps with the DynamicPageList and DynamicPageList2 extensions - however, this extension has a different focus.

Installing

Copy the News directory into the extensions folder of your MediaWiki installation. Then add the following line to your LocalSettings.php file (near the end):

require_once( "$IP/extensions/News/News.php" );

Usage

The News extension prvodes provides three custom tags:

• <news>: this includes a list of recent changes on the wiki page
• <newsfeed>: this defines a news feed of recent changes; on the wiki page, a preview is rendered, similar to the output of the <news> tag; the wiki page then also supports the newsfeed action, which returns the feed in RSS or Atom format.
• <newsfeedlink>: this creates a link to a news feed defined using a <newsfeed> tag. This is convenient for creating prominent links to the news feeds.

Filtering and formatting

To get the last 10 changes to your wiki on any wiki page, use the following:

<news/>

You can provide options to controll the listing (for example, 20 entries and no minor edits):

<news limit="20" nominor/>

To define your own format for the generated list, you can provide a pattern that will be used for each entry:

<news limit="20" nominor>

• [[{{{pagename}}}]] ([[User:{{{user}}}]], {{{timeanddate}}})

</news>

For a full list of options and template parameters, see below.

The <newsfeed> tag supports the same optiosn for filtering and formatting as the <news> tag. For information on how to access a feed defined using <newsfeed>, see the section "Accessing Feeds" below.

Options

The following options (tag attributes) can be used to controll the output of the <news> and <newsfeed> tags:

• unique show only the most recent change to each page

• limit the maximum number of entries to show

• categories limit results to the given categories. Multiple categories can be given separated by "|"; Intersections of categories are not supported. Recursion into subcategories is not supported.

• namespaces limit results to the given namespaces. Multiple namespaces can be given separated by "|"; you can use "0", "-" or "main" to refer to the default namespace.

• notalk ignore all "talk" namespaces. Not used if the namespaces option is given.

• nominor hide minor edits ("true" or "false", default is "false"). If given, the edit shown may not refer to the current revision.

• nobot hide bot edits ("true" or "false", default is "false"). If given, the edit shown may not refer to the current revision.

• noanon hide anonymous edits ("true" or "false", default is "false"). If given, the edit shown may not refer to the current revision.

• onlypatrolled show only patrolled edits ("true" or "false", default is "false"). If given, the edit shown may not refer to the current revision.

• onlynew show only page creations ("true" or "false", default is "false"). If given, the edit shown may not refer to the current revision.

• trigger show only edits with the given trigger in the edit comment. Used primarily to explicitely "publish" pages to a news box or feed. If used, the resulting feed will also look slightly different, focussing less on a single edit and more on the page. Most importantly, the edit comment will not be show in the feed, and a generic link to the page will be used, instead of a permalink to a specific version (unless the permalink option is also set).

• permalinks force the use of permalinks in feeds, even if a trigger is used to publish pages. Per default, feeds that use a trigger use generic page links instead of permalinks to specific versions. Feeds not using a trigger always use permalinks.

• prefix wikitext to be inserted before the wikitext generated from the template text is parsed. Can be used to make tables from news.

• postfix wikitext to be inserted after the wikitext generated from the template text is parsed. Can be used to make tables from news.

Parameters

When giving a template text between the <news> tags, the following template-parameters are available (use them as {{{xxx}}}):

• rawtime raw timestamp - can be formated using the parser function "time", e.g. {{#time:j. M.|{{{rawtime}}}}}

• date date of the edit, formated per user preference

• time time of the edit, formated per user preference

• timeanddate time and date of the edit, formated per user preference

• namespace numeric namespace id, can be used with {{ns:{{{namespace}}}}}

• title canonical title (without namespace prefix)

• pagename full title, with namespace prefix

• type numerical change type (0 = edit, 1 = new, 2 = move, 3 = log, 4 = move-over)

• minor "true" for minor changes, blank otherwise

• user user name who made the entry

• comment edit summary (escaped wikitext, safe to use)

• new_rev revision id associated with this entry (or zero)

• old_rev revision id associated with the entry before this one (or zero)

• diff full diff link for the edit (or blank)

• permalink full url to the revision created by the edit (may not be the current revision)

• bot "true" for bot edits, blank otherwise

• new "true" for newly created pages, blank otherwise

• patrolled "true" if the edit was patrolled, blank otherwise

• old_len page length before the edit

• new_len page length after the edit

• content the full content of the page

• head the page's content up to about 2KB of text, with smart cut-off.

Accessing Feeds

If the page Foo defines a feed using a <newsfeed> tag, that feed can be referenced by using feed=rss or feed=atom in the url respectively.

So, if the URL path for page Foo is /wiki/Foo, you can use

/wiki/Foo?feed=rss

to get an RSS feed for that page. If the URL is /w/index.php?title=Foo, you would use

/w/index.php?title=Foo&feed=rss

You can conveniently create links to feeds using the <newsfeedlink> tag: For example,

<newsfeedlink feed="Foo" format="rss">My Foo Feed</newsfeedlink>

would generate a link to the news feed defined on page Foo using a <newsfeed> tag.

You can also specify an icon to use in the link:

<newsfeedlink feed="Foo" format="rss" icon="rss.png">My Foo Feed</newsfeedlink>

would generate a link that has the image "rss.png" before the link text (the icon option refers to the name of an image uploaded to the wiki).

<newsfeedlink feed="Foo" format="rss" icon="rss.png|right">My Foo Feed</newsfeedlink>

would generate a link that has the image to the right of the link text; and

<newsfeedlink feed="Foo" format="rss" icon="rss.png" title="RSS feed"/>

generates a link that only shows the given icon. The title attribute specifies the tooltip to show when the mouse hovers over the link.

Note that the link text may contain full wiki text, and the title-attribute may contain variables like {{PAGENAME}}.

Configuration

Configuration settings to define in LocalSettings.php

• $wgNewsFeedURLPattern: this defines the pattern used by the <newsfeedlink>

tag to generate feed URLs. In the pattern, $1 will be replaced by the page title, and $2 will be replaced by the requested feed format. If you are using pretty URLs with $wgArticlePath set to $wgScript/$1 or /wiki/$1, etc, you can use the following for nicer feed URLs:

$wgNewsFeedURLPattern = $wgArticlePath . '?feed=$2';

(note that $wgArticlePath already contains $1 with the meaning "page title") If you want to use rewrite rules for canonical feed URLs, like /feed/Foo.rss, set

$wgNewsFeedURLPattern = '/feed/$1.$2';

• $wgNewsFeedUserPattern: this defines the pattern used to generate author

names in feed items. In the pattern, $1 is replaced by the user name. To e.g. generate email-addresses at your site as author names, use

$wgNewsFeedUserPattern = '$1@example.com';