robchur wrote:

Note that in the forthcoming changes to reporting (in branch), reports are split off into a separate section (and some *are* merged together); the list looks quite a bit tidier.

Special:Specialpages reworked with r31590. The page is customizable by editing [[MediaWiki:specialpages-tpl]].

I have some questions/comments:

• What happens with special pages of extensions?
• When there is a new special page in MediaWiki, I assume the developer has to add it to every translated message?

An idea could be to use {{int:specialpages-blabla}} in the headings of the "specialpages-tpl" message, so the message shouldn't be translated to other languages.

ayg wrote:

Those were pretty much exactly my comments. :)

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-March/036818.html

Reverted in r10457.

This is far too fragile. It's a bad interface (witness the huge troubles with sidebar customization as it is), doesn't handle extensions well, doesn't handle localization well, and is generally just going to make things confusing and inconsistent.

Resolving as WONTFIX.

Sorry, that's r31595. Cut-and-pasted wrong number. :)

ayg wrote:

Reopening, since none of the concerns expressed have to do with the bug itself, they have to do with Raymond's implementation. The message interface should not be used, except of course for the messages themselves (e.g., titles of special page groupings). The issue itself remains valid. See the above-linked thread for discussion on alternative implementations.

Created attachment 4766
Patch to group Specialpages list into sections - v1

Further to our discussion a couple of weeks ago on wikitech-l, here is the first draft of my suggested solution. This is just the basic method of implementation - there are various extra features that I would like to add if the general method is approved (which can be added as part of this patch, or later as separate features) plus there are several questions that need discussion before final implementation.

The new page lists pages by section, where 'section' is defined as part of each special page definition. 'section' can be any text, which allows extensions to create new sections if needed. In order to avoid a lot of single item sections, any single-item sections are merged with the general 'miscellaneous' section.

Some questions:

• 'misc' is always at the bottom of the list, but the earlier sections are sorted alphabetically. It might be better to have a fixed 'logical' order, based on most common usage. In this case unrecognised categories (i.e. those added by extensions) would probably be listed alphabetically between the built-in sections and the misc section.
• Currently each section consists of an h3 header, followed by an un-ordered list. Would it be better to do this as nested un-ordered lists?

Some suggested improvements:

• It might be better to merge the restricted pages into the main list, highlighting restricted items (e.g. with an *) and noting that they are restricted and not available to all users. (Ideally it would also indicate the restriction (bureaucrats only, sysadmins only, etc.) but I'm not sure whether this information is easily available.) What do people think about this?
• CSS classes needs to be added - will do that when the overall structure is fixed.

Note that the sections I have used are based on my own structure, as I've only just seen this bug and the suggested layout above. I am happy to change the groupings if the above method is thought to be better, but I've held off doing it until I see what feedback it gets.

Attached:

Forgot to mention - the above patch is against MW 1.12.0, not HEAD.

Done by Aaron with r33197.