Bliki 3.0

I recently worked on a job that required a blog-like functionality to be done in the wiki. I started off basing the system on my Bliki 1.0 method, but started to run into problems implementing a tagging solution (having a tags category of categories, and having each tag page contain a blog-roll query for items of that tag. I got the system to work, but it was messy because the DynamicPageList (DPL) extension that the Bliki functionality is based on ignores includeonly tags and therefore caused all the pages containing blog-roll queries to become categorised into all the tag categories. These query pages could be filtered out of the query results, but it wasn't elegant.

The site I was implementing this functionality on uses Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) for a lot of its other functionality, so I decided to see if I could implement the Bliki functionality with SMW as well and drop DPL all together. This worked out very well and didn't have any messy categorisation problems and was overall a lot more efficient as well. This article describes the process of how to implement a similar system.

Environment

The method required a few extension other than just SMW (and Validator that SMW depends on).

• Semantic MediaWiki
• Validator
• ParserFunctions (with StringFunctions enabled)
• Variables
• ExtraMagic

The following configuration in LocalSettings.php are needed as well (this is in addition to the inclusion of the extensions and their default configuration options).

$wgRawHtml = true; $wgPFEnableStringFunctions = true; $smwgQSubcategoryDepth = 0; $smwgPageSpecialProperties = array( '_CDAT', '_LEDT' );

• Note1: the $wgRawHtml global has been set so that it's easier to add forms, specialised links and JavaScript functionality to articles such as the post a news item page. This is perfectly safe since public signup and editing has been disabled.
• Note2: $smwgQSubcategoryDepth being set to zero is of particular importance in our installation since the blog functionality must only return direct category members.
• Note3: $smwgPageSpecialProperties is added to include the creation and last editor information in an article's semantic properties.