User:Austin J. Che/Extensions/Recentchangesfilter
The standard recent changes list can be overwhelming with the number of changes. An extension to MediaWiki to allow limiting the changes list to certain pages has been written at Special:Recentchangeslimit.
For a quick start and demo, see Reshma Shetty/Recent changes for an example of using this page.
Usage
Currently, the only interface to using this special page is to create a URL by hand. The select criteria is passed in one of two ways. The short/easy way is to pass parameters at the end of the URL as extra path info as in http://openwetware.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslimit/parameters. The second method is: http://openwetware.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslimit&select=parameters. Without any selection parameters, the page should appear almost identical to the normal changes list.
Once a URL is created, the appropriate page can be either bookmarked in your browser, linked from a wiki page, or directly included within another wiki page.
Selection Specification
The selection criteria is specified as a boolean statement in disjunctive normal form (groups of expressions ANDed together that are then all ORed together).
Expression
The general form for an expression is <match type>=<match pattern>.
Match types are 1 or 2 letter codes and specify how the match pattern should be used in selecting items to display in the recent changes list. The basic types and their meaning:
- b: titles that begin with the pattern
- e: titles that end with the pattern
- c: titles that contain the pattern
- m: titles that match where the match expression can contain any number of the '%' character to represent a wildcard character that matches any number of charaters. This is a more general version of the b, e, and c types.
- n: The match pattern in this case must be a number and this matches all pages that are in the given namespace. To find the number of a namespace, go to the normal recent changes limit, select the desired namespace, and look at the URL to determine the namespace to number mapping.
- u: match changes that were done by the given user
- w: match changes for pages on your (or whoever's currently logged in) watchlist. The match pattern is ignored so it can just be set to 1 or left off completely.
All of the above types have a negated version with an extra n in front, i.e. nb, ne, nc, nm, etc. For example, nb=foo will match all pages that don't begin with foo.
If no match type is specified (there is no equals sign), then the matching will be done with the default type of 'b'.
Note that for the purpose of selecting pages by titles, it is necessary to be clear which namespace a page is in. For example, the page User:Austin is not a page titled User:Austin but rather a page titled Austin in the namespace User. Thus, b=User won't match this page but b=Austin would and ns=2 would also as the User namespace is number 2. However, pages like Knight:Contact are in the main namespace so b=Contact wouldn't match this whereas b=Knight would.
Joining Expressions
'^' is used to represent AND and ',' (comma) is used to represent OR. Expressions are assumed to be in disjunctive normal form so there's an intrinsic parenthesis order (and no way to change this order). This means that all the ANDs have higher precedence than the ORs.
Examples
- Select pages that begin with Calendar: Special:Recentchangeslimit/b=Calendar or more simply Special:Recentchangeslimit/Calendar
- Ignore all changes made by User:Austin: Special:Recentchangeslimit/nu=Austin
- Show changes for pages on your watchlist (in a nicer format than you can with the default watchlist): Special:Recentchangeslimit/w=1
- Filter out all pages with a colon in them and pages not in the main namespace: Special:Recentchangeslimit/n=0^nc=:
- Select pages that begin with either Endy or Knight and limit to the last 10 changes: Special:Recentchangeslimit/Endy,Knight&limit=10
- Select pages that have changed in User namespace except for people's user names that end with the letter n or pages that contain the letters a, b, c in that order or that are on your watchlist (demonstrating that you can do useless things to waste time with this extension): Special:Recentchangeslimit/n=2^ne=n,m=%a%b%c%,w=1
Including within another page
The special page can be included using the standard {{Special:Recentchangeslimit/parameters)}} syntax. This allows including a select list of changes on a page.
Source Download
The extension was written by Austin Che and is available for download from:
- file to put in extensions directory
- file to put in includes directory
Feel free to send comments or improvements.
