The following extensions were designed to provide alternate ways to display content and to help make contributing easier on your authors.
For large wikis, your categories may be loaded with content that you wish to share via a print medium or digital reader. This is where the PdfBook extension can come in handy.
This extension extracts your articles from your wiki and creates a PDF file out of it. Each article takes the role of a new chapter and the extension even creates a table of contents for your newly-created book.
When writing, it is common to use outside sources to support your work. However, it is also necessary to cite these sources when you use them.
Cite is an extension that allows you to create footnotes so your visitors can provide credit to anyone else's work they use when writing articles for your wiki.
There are multiple files that need to be installed to get this extension working. If you are installing Cite.php on an older version of MediaWiki, you may have issues with HTML parameters and parser functions. However, Cite is in use by Wikipedia so it is considered a stable extension. When used with versions after 1.11, there have been no reported issues.
If you are using MediaWiki in a corporate or educational environment, there is most likely going to be content that requires the approval of someone else before it is posted. After all, the HR department doesn't want Joe in accounting declaring every Friday to be Hawaiian Shirt day without approval!
The DocumentApproval extension allows the article's author to insert a tag that creates a Sign tab to be displayed. The appropriate user can then use this to approve or sign the document certifying its accuracy.
Need to protect pages against edits from your visitors? The EditOwn extension provides security against any user, other than privileged users, editing a page created by someone else. Users can make any changes to pages they create, but the collaboration benefit of MediaWiki is no longer in place. This can be a good extension to use if you are creating your website with MediaWiki or for an online textbook.
Installing the EmbedPDF extension provides you with the<pdf> and</pdf> tags. Placing the name of an uploaded PDF file or a link to a PDF file hosted elsewhere will create a 700pixel by 600pixel box on the page to display the PDF referred to. Remember, if you are going to host PDF files on your server, you need to tell MediaWiki to allow their uploads.
Earlier we saw how we can embed Flash files into our wiki. The EmbedVideoPlus extension allows us to embed videos from popular video sharing sites such as YouTube. The extension doesn't limit your control of how your videos are displayed. You have the option to define parameters such as alignment, width, and height.
This extension does not require you to upload videos to your server. Instead, you define the service and provide the ID of the video and EmbedVideoPlus goes out to the server and pulls the video for you.
This is another extension we saw in action back in Chapter 6 when we learned how to embed Flash movies into our wiki. Flash extensions can leave your wiki vulnerable to a cross site scripting exploit, so use these extensions carefully.
Quite simply, this extension allows you display a Google Calendar right in your wiki. A separate site from Google, https://www.google.com/calendar/embedhelper, allows you to configure how the calendar is displayed.
Just like Google Calendar, you can embed Google Maps into your wiki with this extension. Think of what you can do with articles about different locations! This extension also allows you to add a make a map link that, when clicked, opens the maps editor.
Want the ultimate in collaboration? How about a marriage of MediaWiki and Google Wave? Google Wave has been called the reinvention of e-mail that allows users to create live, social communication documents that can be edited by multiple users in near real-time. This extension provides just that by allowing you to embed Google Waves right into your wiki using the newly-created<wave id> tag. While the ID of the wave is required, there are other parameters you can define as well:
heightwidthcolorbgcolorfontfontsize
Earlier, we saw how to embed PDF files into your wiki. However, what if you wanted to create a PDF file from an article in your wiki? Rather than printing the page with a PDF creator, install this extension so any of your visitors have the option of turning a page into a PDF file. Don't want a PDF file but you would rather have the page in OpenDocument format? Maybe DocBook XML is the desired output? No problem, the Collection extension allows for any of these formats.
Like the Flash extension, we saw OggHandler back in Chapter 6 to embed Ogg audio and video files into our wiki.