24 April 2007

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

XmlWiki Calendar Ported

The old XmlWiki calendar has been ported to a standard MediaWiki extension called Simple Calendar. It now installs as a parser function, so the following syntax is used:

{{#calendar:}}

An optional name can be added so that different users or groups can have their own calendars, this could be used in conjunction with other functions, eg:

{{#calendar:{{CURRENTUSER}}}}

Also a second optional parameter allows the year to be specified, the current year is used if this is not supplied:

{{#calendar:{{CURRENTUSER}}|2001}}

• See MW:Extension:Simple Calendar for installation and customisation details
• The local code is SimpleCalendar.php

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

ConfirmEdit Extension Installed

We've already had a visit from a vadalbot since the migration to MediaWiki 1.9.3, so I've quickly added the Confirm Edit Extension to the create-login form which adds a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) process which asks a simple mathematical question. This is the standard method used by Wikipedia and its sister projects rather than the more common method of reading obscured characters of text froman image. The reason for this is that there are standard programming libraries becomming commonly available which are able to read most of the CAPTCHA images that humans can read.

• CAPTCHA - Wikipedia page on CAPTCHA
• Gimpy - Breaking a Visual CAPTCHA