Due to popular demand 
I have split out the category suggestion feature from the SelectCategoryTagCloud extension and created the CategorySuggest extension. This extension fills a major gap in the extension list of Mediawiki. By default users have to add categories by adding wikitext to the article (e.g. if you want to add the category “Information Development” to a page, you need to add [[Category:Information Development]] somewhere on the article page). This clearly has some disadvantages including
- lower usage of categories because users don’t know the syntax
- duplication of similar sounding categories because users don’t know that a category already exists
CategorySuggest provides a Google Suggest like functionality to the edit page of articles. A separate “Categories” input box is added below the article page. When a user starts typing the name of an existing category, the extension retrieves a list of existing categories from the Mediawiki database and suggests matches to the user. The user can either type the name of a new extension or pick from the list of suggested categories. Here is a screenshot of the user inteface:
This is version 1.0 and there are still a lot of features and enhancements that can be added. We hope that by providing this initial release we can encourage other users of Mediawiki to test, use but also to help with the further development of the extension. The extension homepage includes a list of TODO’s which would mean a great enhancement to the base functionality.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:48 am
[...] Click over to his blog post describing the extension for a better overview. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
October 12th, 2007 at 6:50 am
[...] MediaWiki installation, I went through various extensions that might prove useful sooner or later. Here’s one that sounds neat. Says the author: [The manual approach of adding categories] clearly [...]
October 18th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Hi.
I look site aboutweb brouser
February 15th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Andreas, are you still working on CategorySuggest? There’s some issues on the talk page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:CategorySuggest
May 5th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Hi,
since I’m using your extension I’m not able to access the special:allmessages page. I found out by gradually changing my local settings configuration file that the problem is here: require_once(”$IP/extensions/CategorySuggest/CategorySuggest.php”);
In fact by disabling the ‘Category suggest’ extension (see below) the the special:allmessages page is up and running again.
# When you make changes to this configuration file, this will make
# sure that cached pages are cleared.
$wgCacheEpoch = max( $wgCacheEpoch, gmdate( ‘YmdHis’, @filemtime( __FILE__ ) ) );
require_once $IP . “/extensions/FCKeditor/FCKeditor.php”;
require_once( $IP.’/extensions/Cite/Cite.php’ );
require_once(”extensions/tag_cloud.php”);
#require_once(”$IP/extensions/TagAsCategory/TagAsCategory.php”);
#require_once(”$IP/extensions/CategorySuggest/CategorySuggest.php”);
I just wanted to confront other users with this issue just to make sure it’s not a local problem of mine.
Compliments for the great job you’re doing.
Best wishes,
Friso
May 5th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Hi Friso,
I can’t see how the extension impacts the Special page as there are no links, but the no one can be too sure. Please also post this on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategorySuggest which should be read by more people.
It’s also worth a try to look at your script size (either in php.ini or as a setting in Localsettings.php). A too small script size (less than 32MB) caused a similar issue for me the other day.
-Andi