ImprovedRecentChanges:Wikka

This is an old revision of ImprovedRecentChanges made by JavaWoman on 2005-04-18 11:09:13.

How to improve RecentChanges

Some sparse suggestions.

Replace ⇒ with &lArr: 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]

Add a link title to the page name, for instance: UserAdmin (roll-over with your mouse to display the title);

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.
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.)