Issue: Wiki Portals

Wikipedia's Portal pages aren't anything special in the back-end. They are just regular pages that have been written for the sole purpose of being an entry page. If you really want them in a separate Portal namespace, you can just create a new namespace called "Portal" and create the pages or move them there. The only reason it is a separate namespace in Wikipedia is because it made it easier to maintain naming and editing conventions on Portal pages.

The Wikipedia page Portal namespace (setting-up debate) shows this a bit more: "The easy solution would be to have a separate Portal namespace, which could develop its own customs, and could be linked to from the article namespace... However, by formalising the concept of a Portal namespace we could make sure that Portals do not go in the article count, and that, by having talk pages of the form Portal talk:Cricket rather than [[Talk:Portal:Cricket]] they are clearly distinguished from the article namespace."

We've been considering removing the Help namespace as an included namespace for the reason that it doesn't serve any special function, and the user can already create such a namespace using the already included tools should they want one.

The main difference of the Portal namespace is being able to create articles in columns, something that would be a pain to do... though gonna have a think over today if I get some time to see how it could be done.

The Help namespace would be better if the default manual was installed during the install process...

That way we can benefit from the manual without the necessity of manually editing it.

I've been looking over this, and can create a rough mockup of how the portals work within mediawiki. There are several 'issues' that I can't see a work around.

First, there is no way of linking back to the edit page for an article. Atm, the BBCode won't add it to the end (naturally) and if you link using the URL BBCode, then it creates an 'outside' link. Is there a way of working around this limitation? Could a change be included to VW?

Second, the ability to transclude articles is important for this to work. Atm, each 'article' has to be manually created. Would it not be possible to include a transclusion of a regular article or section of it (if it had appropriate markup in the BBCode) into another page?

Third, there are a number of little additional features that they have, such as a random selection of articles based on set criteria (I think it's a list within an article), a category list showing an expandable tree from the parent categories, etc. Could options like this be designed in some way within a sort of 'advanced' BBCode manager? Such a BBCode manager would need to be able to benefit from the template system, and be able to process data much as the parser extensions do atm.

Are any or all of these something VW could develop and include?

If you haven't already figured out how, you can link to an article's edit page like:
As for transclusion, this is something we're working on here: http://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/1381/
As for "widget" BB-Codes, this is something that should be requested as an addition to the Parser functions. Please be specific what additional functions are important (e.g. what types of criteria should be choices, how would the syntax work) We are already considering an expandable category tree here: http://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/635/ , but it wouldn't hurt to also suggest it as a separate widget.

Since your suggestions are being discussed elsewhere I'm marking this "Closed (Merged)" in the interest of cleaning up the queue.

I'll have a think about such "widget" BB-Codes and throw some ideas into the pot. I figured the Edit link, and looking forward to seeing the transclusion added as well.

I would much like VW 4.x to have a portal function, to showcase all categories and underlying articles. And also a live feed block of new article updates, similar to i-spy.

we used to use the portal namespace on the mediawiki install
http://www.birthright.net/brwiki/index.php/Portal:BRCS

but the portal feature is NOT mediawiki standard.. it relies on String/Parser/Variable functions.. which are third party addons.
A while ago i suggested to have similar functions for VW.

once you have the functions, you also have your portal functionality (its just templating!)

It would be really nice to have portal functionality to better showcase the true awesomeness of your wiki content. Currently, even in VW4 the entry page is rather dull. I do not thing that mediawiki does this well BTW.
A portal should be visually appealing, catch the interest of readers quickly, and show a lot of information. Similar to how a news portal can do so.

A good portal would do a lot for vaultwiki.