Editing Publisher:Beyond-Social (section)

=== Transclusion ===

This transclusion function has been very helpful for the development of the BS wiki in a practical sense. It turned out to be a useful way to work with a Main Page that we wanted to structure and style, but therefore became quite fragile and difficult to read in terms of many html elements and strict break lines. Within this fragile structure, we wanted to include a few sections on the Main Page that would need curation and therefore writing access, such as the highlighted articles, the category selection and the list of upcoming events. By transcluding single pages into
<div>
elements on the Main Page, the Main Page can be edited by not touching the Main Page itself: the curated sections are edited in a set of other (normal) pages. To do this, we used standard wiki templates. In order to transclude a short 'about' description of the Beyond Social project on the Main Page, we used this template markup

<pre>{{:About_Beyond_Social}} </pre>
to include the page &quot;About_Beyond_Social&quot; into the Main Page. By default, this line trancludes the full page into the Main Page. But as we only wanted to have the first paragraph of the page, we added <noinclude> tags around the rest of the text. These no-inclusion tags mark which text should never be transluded into another page, and make sure that this text will still be visible when someone visits the page &quot;About_Beyond_Social&quot; itself. Another way to include a specific part of text is by using the <nowiki><includeonly></nowiki> tags. For us these tags were less useful, as these tags mark which text should be transcluded, but will make this text invisible when visiting the page itself. Visit the MediaWiki documentation pages to read more about on [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion transclusion] and [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates templates].

A second type of transclusion that we wanted to include for the Main Page were the listings of recent user activity that are built-in wiki functions, such as recent files, new pages, wanted pages (red links) and listings of articles using the Editorial template. Some of these lists can be transcluded into other pages using standard wiki templates, such as the recent files list that can be queried like this:

<pre>{{:Special:Newimages/12}} </pre>
For the more specific lists that we wanted to use, such as a list of all the pages that use the Template:Editorial for example, we needed a few more transclusion options . MediaWiki software comes with many functions, but there is also a large amount of plugins available, called extensions, of which some are more stable then other. (See [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:All_extensions this page] listing all available extensions in the MediaWiki database.) We decided to use an external plugin called [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList_%28third-party%29 DynamicPageList] (DPL) that offers specific transclusion options to create lists of a specific category or query the last batch of activity from a special page such as all the pages that use the Template:Editorial. A DPL transclusion to do this looks like this:

<pre>&lt;DPL&gt;

  uses=Template:Editorial

  ordermethod=firstedit

  order=descending

  count=10

&lt;/DPL&gt; </pre>