How to improve RecentChanges
Some sparse suggestions.
- Replace ⇒ with ⇐: IMO it makes more sense to have the arrow point FROM the author TO the PAGE, for instance:
(08:45 UTC) [history] - UserAdmin ⇐ DarTar [Updating links and changelog]
- Get rid of the arrow altogether and just write "by" - it's clearer and avoids rendering problems. --JW
- The arrow doesn't show up correctly on all platforms, depending on charset etc. Use → instead. -- TKN
- make it configurable ;-) i like the double arrow very much. -- MinusF
- Agreed -- DarTar
- Give admins freedom to choose through an action parameter what links should be displayed: history, revisions, none, both;
- Make the author's name clickable if the corresponding page exists. (see FormatUserMethod)
Since this might clutter up the page with a lot of links, I suggest we add a simple username check to the link parser and a special CSS class for userpages. The parser will check if a given link corresponds to an existing user page; if it does, the link is rendered with a class="user" attribute. If it doesn't, raw text is displayed instead of a link. For instance:
(08:45 UTC) [history] - UserAdmin ⇐ DarTar [Updating links and changelog]
Such functionality makes sense also outside the scope of the RecentChanges action. It would be nice to mark links to internal user pages in a different, CSS-driven way. As a further extension, links corresponding to user pages could be given a specific tail (much as external links), for instance an icon or a some specific HTML code. See LinkTails for further discussions on this issue.
Your thoughts?
- My four "biggies" about our current RecentChanges are all to do with content and its usability and usefulness:
- Change the name "RecentChanges" to "RecentlyChanged" (both page and action!) - analogous to "RecentlyCommented" - because that's what it is. (Note that I have already created a "RecentComments" page, and have been able to do that since there is at least an action provided for both "views"; for "changes" this is not the case.)
- Make a real RecentChanges action.
- Make corresponding pages for both actions like we have now for comments.
- Provide feeds (for both) in several modern formats: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom.
- See RSSHandler -- DarTar
- (Side note: Corresponding feeds for comments would be useful, too.) --JavaWoman
feed icons
seems like these icons will be the standard in the future.
the xml icon is nice but it's not clear that it is a feed. i have already replaced it (also please note that
it is a feddburner feed actually -- perhaps this could be also configurable?)
- MinusF, I like very much the new icons, thanks for suggesting this (although I find the one on your site way too big). As for human readable feeds, instead of using an external service, a nice alternative is to provide styling through CSS (see RSSHandler for some first tests) -- DarTar
- the external feed service is not for human readable feeds, it's because of the statistics and such... --MinusF
and $logged_in_navigation_links but it's not trivial at the moment as far as i can tell...
- It will be trivial to add custom menu items, including a feed icon, once WikkaMenus and WikkaMenulets are available with the new template -- DarTar
CategoryDevelopmentActions
