Category: Work

For one of our internal MediaWiki installations we used the DynamicPageList extension to show a list of the most popular page on our wiki’s main page. We found it to be handy to have an at-a-glance view into what’s the most utilized content. However, we recently upgraded to a newer version of MediaWiki (1.23) and were having issues with DPL. As such our list disappeared while I worked on another solution.

What I discovered is that you can use the External Data extension paired with the MediaWiki API to produce a dynamic list of Special:PopularPages¹

First to understand what the API query looks like. Here’s what I’m using:

https://yourwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=querypage&qppage=Popularpages&qplimit=10&format=xml

Breaking that down, we’re asking to query (action=query) the API, return a list from a page (list=querypage) and defining which page (qppqge=Popularpages). Then we set some limits and formats (qplimit=10 and format=xml). Note: You can even use an offset (qpoffset=5) to display multiple selections of data combined with the limits.

Then, on the page you want the list to appear add the following External Data syntax.

{{#get_web_data:url=https://yourwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=querypage&qppage=Popularpages&qplimit=10&format=xml
|format=XML
|data=Title=title
}}

<div>{{#display_external_table:
template=PopularPagesExtAPITable
|data=title=Title}}</div>

That syntax says get the data from the API query, format it as XML, and match up the value for Title to a local variable of title.

Then, we use #display_external_table to format the results using a template. The <div> and other syntax is for styling the results.

In the template, this case named PopularPagesExt, we have the following:

<li style="list-style-type: none;">[[{{{title}}}|{{{title}}}]]</li>

This says for each result returned in our #get_web_data query make it a list item, apply some styles (in this case removing bullets), and then use the returned value as a standard wiki link – [[Page Name|Link Text]]

The link text is the same as the name of the page. Makes sense, no?

The result is a dynamic list of Popular pages that you can place on any wiki page.