We want to give admins a dialog where they can enter or select a customizable backlink marker alphabet. See epic for more details.
When present we'll use the CommunityConfiguration mechanics. This is the umbrella ticket for work related to that.

Investigations

• T377918: Investigate potential Community Configuration for Cite
• T383217: Evaluate plans for the Cite backlink marker setting via CommunityConfiguration

Features & Decisions

• We'll have a setting to use CommunityConfiguration and one for disabling the legacy markers
• We'll have a system of sensible default values and fallbacks: T381465: Investigation: Plan fallbacks for Cite when lacking Community Configuration or cldr
• Textarea for custom marker set
• Provide suggestions for an Alphabet depending on CLDR and the content lang
• Some minimal validation that will be shown as errors. See e.g T384494: Validate that the provided alphabet doesn’t include combinations like “ab, ac” etc.
• Might check for existing customizations and display them
• Might want to offer a live preview

Mockups

https://www.figma.com/design/Waj127iiav7sRHENkkZkc2/Backlinks-Special-Page-UI

Implementation Steps

• Implement an algorithm that uses an alphabet to combine the symbols to represent an index number --> T377575: [POC] Initial community configuration page for Cite: reflist backlink label symbol selection
• Write function to check for existing i18n backlink customization --> T384492: Check for existing i18n backlink customization
• Write function to validate that the provided alphabet doesn’t include “ab, ac” etc. --> T384494: Validate that the provided alphabet doesn’t include combinations like “ab, ac” etc.
• Write logic to test for CLDR alphabet being found and turn it into a whitespace-separated string. --> T384495: Add a suggestion for a backlink alphabet using CLDR
• Evolve the POC Community Configuration page into a simple first iteration of the page. Wire in and out of our custom page, loading and saving the variable. Deal with PHP config interactions. -->T378807: Implement a first draft version of Cite backlinks using CommunityConfiguration
• Adjust the Codex interface to include just an input field for the Alphabet T385146: Add i18n text to the Codex templates
• Investigation: is it possible to render our custom page as a subpage of Special:CommunityConfiguration? So far this seems to only include “vanilla” config pages which use the high-level integration.
• Optional: evolve the POC live preview.

Integration in CommunityConfiguration Extension

We currently plan to implement our own, custom editor for the page, rather than letting CommunityConfiguration generate a page based on our schema. To accomplish this, we'll set the CommunityConfiguration.EditorCapabilities attribute in extension.json and implement AbstractEditorCapability using GenericFormEditorCapability as a guide.

This method of integration should result in our custom page appearing along with the other generic pages on the main menu Special:CommunityConfiguration .

Ours will be the first deployment of this type of customization.