FIRSTwiki:Feature requests

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This page is intended to be a place to put Feature requests for FIRSTwiki. If your request is concerning content or formatting of actual content in FIRSTwiki, FIRSTwiki:Requested articles, FIRSTwiki:To Do, or FIRSTwiki:Village pump may be more appropriate.

MediaWiki software is in rapid development. What this means is that your feature request may soon be implemented in the software. More importantly, this means that adding custom features is difficult for two reasons. Documentation is (very) sparse, and any changes will likely have to be ported to a newer version of the software (note how my little save image as a different name thing is gone). The software is developing into a much more modular and accesible form that will make features much easier to add, but as of now, there is nothing even close to a plugin/module API or anything of the sort.

This may sound like good reason to not stay current with MediaWiki software or to use some other software or homeberewed system. Our primary goal is to keep the website as useful and functional as we can with what resources we have. As such, we will forgo the "elegant" or "more correct" solutions for what gives us the best results.

Below is a list of general categories of features and what might be involved in implementing them. Requests should be placed in the appropriate category.

Contents 1 Modifications to the parser or markup (Wikitax) and subsequent formatting 2 Skins, appearance, etc. 3 Special: pages 4 Auto edit summaries

Modifications to the parser or markup (Wikitax) and subsequent formatting

This is likely one of the hardest places to crack into in the software and therefore the one that requires the most work to modify and port to future versions of the software. Luckily, newer versions of MediaWiki will include a standardized system for adding external content to pages.

• Some sort of identifying attribute of links to ChiefDelphi pages (orange color? different external webpage icon?) --Max 23:37, 15 Jun 2004 (EDT)

Skins, appearance, etc.

Likely the easiest place to make modifications as version 1.3 has made the system relatively customizable and has moved much of the skin code into flat files (css, html). Note that discussion of development a new default skin for FIRSTwiki should likely have its own page.

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I've tried working with a few tables, but always have been forced to look to some other idea to format a page. The reason is that, unless the table is centered, I cannot seem to get text to stop floating around it. I've scoured wikipedia, but haven't found the problem or any reference to it (though I have the same problem on wikipedia, but I am just using the pipe code they give, ... confusing indeed). Refer, for instance, to the table I put on FIRSTwiki:Sandbox about data types. It would be awfully nice if that could be made to look pretty. I don't know if this is accurately a feature request, -- I could very well just be doing things wrong. What tables I've come across on wikipedia that look good seem to be done in HTML. Ah, I suppose I could do that if I were forced to ... --Mrawls 16:51, 29 Jun 2004 (EDT)

Special: pages

New special function pages (like Special:Mostwanted or Special:Allpages) are also good candidates for addition because they are largely independent of the rest of the software except for links to them.

• Re-adding save as different name and allowing URLs as valid file sources in Special:Upload --Max 23:37, 15 Jun 2004 (EDT)

• Referring to this page (Category:Sysop), it might be a good idea to have some image by the name if the particular admin is online (well, viewing this site, anyway ... or maybe active within the last 10 minutes, or some such). Is this desirable? feasable, given the wikimedia structure (I'm unfamiliar with it)? --Mrawls 20:45, 15 Jun 2004 (EDT)

• Is it possible to make the "Random page" link exclude team pages, so that it is more useful and the team pages don't flood it with unwanted results? Perhaps an option, in case team pages are wanted? --Mrawls

After a quick look at the random page code, I could probably do it without the option in only an hour or two and it would probably be pretty stable for future code, but the user option is significantly more difficult to do it well (several good days and lots of wading through un-documented code). --Max 23:47, 15 Jun 2004 (EDT)

Auto edit summaries

It would be nice to have wikipedia:Automatic edit summaries. Saves time when doing redirects. Additionally, it makes it easier to spot vandalism when viewing Special:Newpages. -- ZhongHan (Email) 20:20, 8 March 2007 (EST)