News (blog)

From Organic Design wiki

5 November 2008[edit]

Posted by Nad on 5 November 2008 at 05:19
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EmailPage extension updated to support personalised emails[edit]

The EmailPage extension now supports personalised emails. Articles can contain named fields enclosed in braces which we be replaced with specific values for each recipient. The records it draws the data from are in the format used by other extensions such as Semantic Forms and RecordAdmin where each kind of record is a template for example Template:Member whose named triple-brace arguments define the fields of the record. To ensure that it's known to be treated as a record rather than any other template it should be categorised into Category:Records (using noinclude tags). Articles can then become records by transcluding a record template and giving it some specific parameters.

Example record

This example is for those who don't already have a system of maintaining records in wiki articles. First we'll define a new template article called Template:Person containing defining a name and an email address, and a simple layout table so that the record articles are easy to read (the layout in the template doesn't have anything to do with emailing though).

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Name:</th>
        <td>{{{name}}}</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <th>Email:</th>
        <td>{{{email}}}</td>
    </tr>
</table>

You can then create as many records as you like for example a new article called Maryjane may contain the following:

{{Person
 | name  = Maryjane
 | email = maryjane@smokyjoes.com
}}
Messages containing fields

Using our new records, we can send an article to the recipients with their proper name in the message, for example our article may contain the following wikitext content:

Dear {name|valued customer},
We'd like to remind you that some say our products can be up to
three times better quality than many other leading brands!

In the EmailPage form, select "Person" from the optional record drop-down box and send as normal. For each recipient, the extension will check if any record (article transcluding Template:Person) have the current email address in their parameters. If so, all the parameter values will be extracted from that article and used to replace the corresponding fields in the content being sent.

Default values can be supplied in case there is no record found, or the record doesn't contain some of the parameters. This is done using the pipe character as in the example above which replaces the name field with "valued customer" if the field can't be replaced. If there is no default, the brace enclosed name will be left unchanged in the content that gets sent.

22 July 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 22 July 2012 at 12:37
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Syria needs you![edit]

Occupy Syria.jpg
This is from Syria's "99%", they urge you to learn the truth of their situation from the real people on the ground, not from the mainstream media which is a total disinformation campaign. Please help them by listening to them and sharing the information on their Facebook page.

See also:

25 December 2009[edit]

Posted by Nad on 24 December 2009 at 20:28
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Merry Christmas![edit]

Merry Christmas from the Organic Design team! although it appears that activity has dropped off a lot this year, things are still developing well behind the scenes. Our organisational system has been in use for the last six months in our private work wiki, it's almost ready for the demo version to be unveiled here on our public site for people to download and install. See wiki organisation for more information.

11 October 2013[edit]

Posted by Nad on 11 October 2013 at 22:49
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The Internet decides to fire the U.S.[edit]

Internet fires US.png
In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organisations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance. [more...]

See also:

4 October 2011[edit]

Posted by Nad on 4 October 2011 at 22:09
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PostiveMoneyNZ - proposal for monetary reform in NZ[edit]

Positive Money New Zealand is a campaign to move New Zealand from a debt-based economy to one that operates with a full reserve in which money has been issued debt-free and interest-free.

This will free the nation and its people from the crippling effects of ever increasing interest bills - that keep the majority of people on the debt treadmill.

The campaign is based on one that has been running in the UK called Positive Money - which started in May 2010 as well as a similar one in the United States called the American Monetary Institute - which began in 1996.

Positive Money New Zealand began when Sue Hamill and Don Richards had the current debt based system explained to them in 2010, while watching Money as Debt. When they learnt that New Zealand operated under the same system - they customised the UK campaign - to the New Zealand situation.

See also:

30 May 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 30 May 2007 at 01:51
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DPL Extension Updated[edit]

The DynamicPageList extension on Organic Design has been updated from version 1.1.8 to the latest stable release, version 1.2.0. See DPL:Version History for details about the changes.

9 May 2008[edit]

Posted by Nad on 9 May 2008 at 06:49
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SQLite support moved into main codebase[edit]

SQLite database support is now maintained directly as part of the main MediaWiki code-base rather than as a separately installed extension.

20 September 2008[edit]

Posted by Milan on 18 September 2008 at 12:10
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Celebrating Freedom[edit]

Softwarefreedomday2008.svg

This Saturday, September 20th, there will be worldwide events to celebrate free software. As you can see from the map of events, there are hundreds of happenings at locations across all continents, including the humble Devonport, NZ - a reported stronghold of Organic Design supporters! Teams that registered early could request numerous give-aways, which were donated by the sponsors (nice to see some sizable "corporates" amongst them!) and distributed by the Software Freedom Day (SFD) organisers. A wiki is being used to coordinate the event, it has a very comprehensive instruction manual for running an event and a blog section for frequent updates in various languages.

The organisation and structure of the event itself can be seen as an expression of free software ideals; it is an example of people coming together around the world to celebrate one of our most basic and treasured ideals - that of freedom. The resources supplied on the wiki include marketing material in open formats and some loose guidelines, such as agreeing to keep things positive, rather than bashing certain corporations which shall remain unnamed. The event has been held for several years and is growing in size every time. At SFD 2007, there were over 330 teams registered, this year there are over 500! Kudos to the organisers, the teams and of course the sponsors, for doing the right thing.

Some of us will be doing a stall at Wharf IT, a local affiliated business, to show what can be done with free software. There will be public software demonstrations and people will be able to take home various Linux distributions on DVD or memory stick; we will also cater to Mac and Windows users.

So help us make this a big day, it is not too late to register a team and of course you can always support your local team by showing up at the event!

17 June 2008[edit]

Posted by Nad on 17 June 2008 at 01:22
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The Benefits of Subversion[edit]

We've recently started moving many of our extension code into the MediaWiki Subversion (SVN) repository so that their development can benefit from the input of all those working on the main code-base and other extension developers who take an interest.

This has already proved to be a very productive move, for example, the EmailArticle extension was moved across one month ago today and has already been internationalised and messages fully translated for 14 new languages; Arabic, Bulgarian, Esperanto, French, Galician, Luxembourgish, Malayalam, Marathi, Dutch, Norwegian, Occitan, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese!

4 October 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 3 October 2007 at 23:07
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Regular expressions extension added[edit]

The RegexParserFunctions extension has been added to our list of extensions available to the OD/Wikia. This allows regular expression string replacements, for example:

{{#regex:{{PAGENAME}}|%^.*/(.*)$%|$1}}

Forward slashes can also be used as delimiters, but percent is more practical if the expression contains slashes.