11 June 2007

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

A new template for finding articles

Template:Find is a new template made using the Simple Forms extension to make a more sophisticated search form for the site. The new search form works like usual but has extra buttons for sending the query to Wikipedia or Google, instead of just the usual go and full-text-search buttons. Also if the go button is used and the search query contains one or more "=" characters, it will be treated as a DPL query allowing searching for articles by regular expression, category, template-use and much more.

There was no programming required to add this functionality to the wiki because it's all done using the Simple Forms and WikiSkin extensions.

Here's a couple of useful query examples:

category=Foo     (list all articles in Category:Foo)

uses=News|ordermethod=firstedit     (list all articles using Template:News ordered by their creation date)

createdby=Foo     (list all articles created by User:Foo)