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17 June 2007
Posted by Nad on 17 June 2007 at 08:21
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Another extension in the field The FormMailer extension was completed today which allows forms in the wiki to be sent to a specified list of recipients. This is useful for people using their MediaWiki to maintain website content who wish to have enquiry forms in the site. This extension only handles the sending of the data in the form, but does not offer any means to create forms, for that you can use the SimpleForms extension. It was developed for this form on the Literacy North Shore website which is mantained with a MediaWiki.

16 September 2008
Posted by Nad on 15 September 2008 at 12:35
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Happy 25th Birthday GNU! Stephen Fry wishes GNU a happy 25th birthday and explains a few things about GNU, Linux and free software in a short video.

24 April 2007
Posted by Nad on 24 April 2007 at 02:01
This post has the following tags: News
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 Extension: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

27 September 2012
Posted by Nad on 27 September 2012 at 21:03
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Site upgrade The site has been upgraded today from MediaWiki version 1.16.5 to version 1.19.2. We haven't upgraded for a long time because there was a lot of functionality in the site that cannot work with recent versions of MediaWiki, but it's time to move on now and so a lot of these things which don't work are now marked as "Legacy".

7 July 2007
Posted by Nad on 7 July 2007 at 03:24
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format DynamicPageList Extension Updated The DynamicPageList extension (DPL) has been upgraded today from version 1.2.0 to 1.2.3. There are a couple of notable changes in this new version. The first is that %0 can now be used in the DPL include statement which allows the text before the first section and table of contents to be included. This zeroeth section is usually a very useful summary of the entire article and so is a very useful section to be able to render in DPL results. The second new feature allows the Special:DynamicPageList to render naked results with no edit form which makes it very useful for Ajax forms that use DPL. Currently special pages can't be used in conjunction with action=render, but this functionality will soon be added to SimpleForms since it's also needed for allowing SemanticForms to be used in Wiklets. The DPL special page isn't much more useful than the sandbox as a user interface to DPL functionality, but is very useful in that it's a simple way of making DPL queries directly via query-string. Here's an example of using Special:DynamicPageList to make a simple query which returns the results without any edit form by adding the noeditbox parameter to the DPL query. Special:DynamicPageListSP/namespace=User&&titlematch=%foo%&&noeditbox See also DPL:Version History DPL:Manual - DPL Special Page with Parameters

23 June 2007
Posted by Nad on 23 June 2007 at 11:47
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format OD's URL's get slightly friendlier Our Mod-Rewrite rules have been updated today to allow them to become even more friendly by not appending any page name to the URL when requests are made to the naked domain name. The new rules are as follows: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ RewriteRule ^/(.*) /index.php/Main_Page [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(wiki|files)/ RewriteRule ^/(.*) /index.php/$1 [L] The first condition and rule pair handles requests to the naked domain name and rewrites the to Main_Page so that the URL doesn't get appended with the "Main Page" name. The second pair says not to touch any URL's which start with /wiki/ or /files/, this protects all old-style article requests, and requests to internal MediaWiki files like scripts or images. It also allows other directories of web documents outside the wiki such as http://www.organicdesign.co.nz/files/od/media See also Friendly URL's - local article on our friendlt URL's MW:Manual:Short URL - MediaWiki's manual entry

27 March 2011
Posted by Nad on 27 March 2011 at 20:17
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format RecordAdmin performance improved One of our clients has some complex record tables which became extremely slow when there were more than 100 rows of data in the resultant set. After analysing the execution of the slow queries it turned out that over 90% of the processing time was in the renderRecords method. The problem was that the initialisation of the wiki parser takes a lot of resource, and it was being initialised once for every cell of data in the table. The problem was fixed (see diff) by breaking the render loop out into two passes, the first to build a single block of wikitext for the whole table with delimiters for columns and rows, and the second to render the table drawing from the pre-parsed cell data rather than calling the wiki parser directly. This has resulted in a massive performance improvement in record table rendering, large tables having more than a hundred rows can now render over fifty times faster!

16 June 2007
Posted by Nad on 15 June 2007 at 12:13
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Two New Extensions Two small extensions have been created, Extension:CSS which allows CSS articles to be added to a page (see example), and Extension:PublicCat which allows simple setup of MediaWiki to manage both private wiki and public website aspects of content. This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Internet Explorer Problems I haven't checked what the site looks like in Internet Explorer for some time now, and discovered today that it's completely stuffed up in IE to the point of being unuseable. I'll get round to fixing this at some stage when I get the chance, so if you're an IE user either wait until then or download Firefox.

4 January 2008
Posted by Nad on 4 January 2008 at 09:55
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format DPL updated to 1.6.4 The DPL extension was upgraded today from version 1.4.8 to 1.6.4. There seems to be a problem with our DPL setup which makes queries that should be straight forward occupy 99.9% of our servers CPU for 30 seconds or so! For example the following one which I wanted to put in our side bar to show the most recently edited articles. {{#dpl:namespace= |count=5 |ordermethod=lastedit |order=descending |format=,*[[%PAGE%|%TITLE%]]\n,, }}

11 July 2013
Posted by Nad on 11 July 2013 at 16:08
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format The first step towards migrating to Git Eventually we'd like to migrate our code repositories over completely from Subversion to Git since Git is much more in line with our philosophy being peer-to-peer instead of centralised. A full migration is a big process though - the Wikimedia foundation took well over a year of discussions and testing to achieve this migration. But after the recent migration we made on our web-server from Apache to Nginx, we were left with the problem of anonymous users no longer being able to checkout local read-only copies of our code over HTTP since it relies on a module which isn't available for Nginx. We set up a Guest RSA key so that users could still do this over SSH, but this is a very complicated process for the average user and is a complete nightmare for Windows users. So we took this problem as an opportunity to take the first step on the Git-migration journey! I found a very useful script by Daniel Pocock here which allows a read-only Git mirror to be maintained automatically from your Subversion repositories. This means anonymous users can easily access and use our public code while we still continue working with our local Subversion repositories without requiring any changes to our procedures :-) Our GitHub mirror is at github.com/OrganicDesign and I documented my procedure for setting the script up here.

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