DPL:Manual - Authors and History

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Manual Authors and History

DynamicPagelist2 vs. DynamicPageList

There was a basic version of this extension some time ago. Later it was enhanced by many new features and the name was changed to DynamicPageList2. The new version was no longer downward compatible. At the same time the name of the original extension was changed to 'Intersection' (but the documentation kept talking of DynamicPageList and the tag name still was <DynamicPageList>).

Some time later another bunch of features had been added. And the name was changed back to DynamicPageList (which was thought to be 'free').

Meanwhile some new features had also been added to 'Intersection' and recently 'Intersection' requested its original name back - which caused a real lot of confusion regarding the naming.

Currently (as of June 2009) the status is as follows:

  • Some wikimedia websites like wikinews use the old version. They call it 'Intersection' or 'DynamicPageList'. Its tag is <DynamicPageList> and the sources are in the mediawiki SVN under the path name 'DynamicPageList'.
  • Some other websites switched to DynamicPageList2 - a version which is commonly considered to be obsolete by now. They may want to change to DPL as it is 95% downward compatible with DPL2.
  • Quite a lot of websites use DPL now, i.e. the extension distributed on this website. They call it DPL or DynamicPageList. It uses the tag <dpl> and in addition offers the parser function {{#dpl: ....}}. The source is available here under Download.

There is an opinion which says that running DPL on a major public website would introduce the risk that people write queries which consume a lot of resources. And apart from there is the problem of incompatibilities between 'Intersection' and DPL. 

It is time to put an end to this mess.
  • A large effort was recently put into DPL to make it functionally 100% downward compatible with 'Intersection'. Missing commands were added and the semantics of some existing commands were slightly altered. For details read the chapter on DPL:Manual - Compatibility.
  • A concept of functional restrictions was introduced which allows it to configure DPL with different levels of functionality. The lowest level corresponds exactly to 'Intersection' as of today.
  • An advanced caching concept was introduced which makes it possible to save the result of DPL queries independent from the rest of a page. This means that this DPL cache even survives edit actions of the page containing the DPL invocation - as long as the DPL statement itself is not changed.
So, in near future there will only be one extension named DynamicPageList(DPL) which unites all previous branches.

Main Authors / Contacts

Version History

You can find the early parts (before 0.92) of DPL history on metawiki:

The complete history since 0.92 can be found in this wiki, see Version History.

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