mediawiki update brings new goodies for wikinews

Now that Wikimedia got updated, we get to have all the cool new features, which is exciting! I always love software updates. Furthermore, almost none of the javascript broke (well one minor thing we stole from commons did, but otherwise all is well. None of *my* js broke ;) Well actually one thing I did broke due to the mediawiki and user namespace on wiktionary becoming first letter case insensitive, but other then that nothing broke. On the bright side, due to the software update, my WiktLookup gadget now works in IE (or should anyways, haven't tested).

The one feature we [at wikinews] were waiting for was changes to DynamicPageList that allows us to put our developing articles on the Main Page without them being picked up by Google news. (Google news assumes any article on our main page with a number in the url, that does not have nofollow is a published news article. Since we allow anyone to create an article, we don't want our articles in progress being picked up by google). Thus {{main devel}} is back on the main page after a long absence.

Speaking of DynamicPageList (to clarify, the Wikimedia one, not DPL2), it has a number of cool new features for us at Wikinews, and other wikis that use it. (I'm especially happy about this, as I contributed a patch for it, and its really cool to see something I've done go live). Among other things, it can now list articles alphabetically (a feature request from wikibooks), and you can specify the date format that the article was added to the category (before it was just a boolean on/off switch). However, one of the coolest new features (imho) is the ability to use image gallery's as an output mode. One can now use DynamicPageList to make a <gallery> of say the first 20 images in both Category X and Category Y but not in Category Z.

Here's to all the devs for continuing to do an excellent job with Mediawiki.

Cheers,
Bawolff