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KMediaWiki ;)

Tuesday, 15 May 2007  |  jaroslaw staniek

Thanks to help from danimo, I've grabbed techbase's nice MediaWiki Oxygen web skin and turned it into a regular KDE web/news site skin in Poland (the result: kde.org.pl, dot article). What means that unlike on techbase, which is aimed at more collective editing, kde.org.pl has left hand menu as well wiki tools are accessible and visible only for logged-in users. So it is more like kde.org.

The editorial staff is not big so I used extensions like DynamicPageList so they can save time by inserting automatically generated list of pages of given type/subtype (either sorted alphabetically or by creation date), e.g. see Droga do KDE 4 (i.e. Road to KDE 4).

There are also

  • fixes for IE (danimo, ping me for these before I really forget what to do)
  • my own breadcrumb navigation style (greatly reducing clutter in the title, IMHO also _well_ suitable for techbase)
  • rss/atom feeds system that you can configure as easily as is wiki editing (a bit changed to show the same feed on every page)
  • unlike in techbase, by default images are not clickable for not-loggedin users, to avoid confusion (users no longer end up on http://techbase.kde.org/Image:Action_launch.svg page when what they really wanted is to visit http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started); having available <a href..> links in the wiki also helps to create explicit links to external places when [[ ]] does not work well
  • Lightbox JS code plugged in an insanely simple and effective way -- every thumbnail you insert in the wiki markup will automatically be plugged to lightbox; e.g. see thumbnails on this page

The final word is a note: if you want to run similar Oxygen-compatible KDE web site for your country, either by replacing the older one or starting a new one, let me know you want the templates and some mentoring. Most languages are supported. But remember you still need a few folks for editorial staff -- things won't happen automatically (translation, local articles, administration).