20 MediaWiki Extensions You Should Be Using

MediaWiki is a great PHP-based Wiki application that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia itself. One of MediaWiki strengths is how easy it is to extend with its plug-in architecture.

The following is a list of 20 extensions that should make your life easier and save you a fair bit of time. Check them out and tell me if I’ve missed anything:

20. SimpleFeed
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleFeed

This extension outputs the contents of an RSS feed. It is very customisable and no output format is forced on the user. As a result, no editing of the PHP source is required as everything is done in the wiki page. This extension uses the SimplePie PHP feed-parsing library.

19. FlashMP3
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlashMP3

FlashMP3 embeds a simple Flash-player for playback of mp3-files. It is based on the great Audio Player WordPress plugin by 1pixelout. It can handle multiple local and/or remote files in one player and multiple players on each site. The appearance of the player is highly customizable.

18. VideoFlash
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VideoFlash

VideoFlash is an extension that displays videos from Youtube, GoogleVideo, Dailymotion, Sevenload, Revver and similar services based on FLV video format.

17. Tasks
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Tasks_Extension

This extension provides the ability to create tasks on any page of your MediaWiki. Tasks may have severity, priority, status, and owner properties set. Also included is a highly configurable Special page for aggregateing tasks on your site by various criteria. All tasks are stored in MySQL, so the Special page is extremely fast.

16. ContactPage
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ContactPage

The ContactPage extension implements a contact form for visitors. It creates a special page Special:Contact, which is similar to Special:Emailuser, but it has a fixed recipient, and can be used anonymously.

15. Preloader
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Preloader

The Preloader extension allows the creation of boilerplate text which will be inserted into the edit form when creating new pages. Different boilerplate text can be specified for different namespaces.

14. Data
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Data

Enables getting and setting of data in the articles. Data is described by item/key/value triplets, where ‘item’ is typically the name of the article, ‘key’ the name of the data, and ‘value’ the actual data.

13. Nuke
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke

Gives sysops the ability to mass delete pages.

12. RenameUser
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Renameuser

Special page allows user accounts to be renamed.

11. CheckUser
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser

CheckUser is an extension that allows a user to check which IPs are used by a given username and which usernames are used by a given IP, without having to run queries directly against the database by hand. The extension is running live on all Wikimedia wikis.

10. WikiChat
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Chat

Adds a Chat tab to every wiki Article that switches to an embedded chatroom with the same name as the article title. It can be configured to have only one chatroom for all articles, rather than one chatroom per article (the default).

9. ArticleComments
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ArticleComments

The ArticleComments Extension is a MediaWiki extension that provides a means for creating inline blog-like comment forms for regular wiki articles.

8. DPLforum
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DPLforum

DPLforum is a heavily-adapted derivation of DynamicPageList 1.12, geared toward displaying forum-style layouts. New features in version 3.0 include author listings, compact display, and full multipage support. Version 3.1 introduces prefix matching, for better interoperability with CreateBox.

7. Discussion Threading
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DiscussionThreading

Makes the talk area work like a threaded process, including auto tagging and reply processing.

6. Tree view
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Treeview

Allows dynamic tree-views to be made with bullet-list syntax.

5. Calendar (Damian)
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Calendar_%28Cdamian%29

4. SyntaxHighlight GeSHi
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi

Allows source code to be syntax highlighted on the wiki pages.

3. Inputbox
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Inputbox

The Inputbox extension is an extension to add predefined HTML forms to wiki pages. It was originally created for the purpose of adding a Create an article box to Wikinews.

2. CategoryTree
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategoryTree

The CategoryTree extension provides a dynamic view of the wiki’s category structure as a tree. It uses AJAX to load parts of the tree on demand.

1. Semantic MediaWiki
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_MediaWiki

SMW allows users to add structured data to wiki pages through simple wikitext markup that identifies relations between pages and attribute values of pages. With this information, SMW can help to search, organize, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki’s content.

My Extensions:

1. Issue Tracker / Bug Tracker
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:IssueTracker
The IssueTracker extension is a simple and powerful bug tracking and issue tracking system developed to make this process easier for your team. It introduces the <issues /> tag to the MediaWiki markup, which can be used to produce an issue and bug tracking system.