Guild Wars Wiki:Requests for technical administration/DynamicPageList

Home-page: http://semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php/Main_Page (@mediawiki.org)
Type: MediaWiki extension
Installation notes: http://semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php/Manual_-_Source_and_Installation
Additional software requirements: None
Additional server-side maintenance requirements: None
Reason for request: DPL creates lists of articles based on the categories they belong to, their namespace, template usage, title, etc, with also the possibility to include contents from these articles into the page where the DPL query is called from. Several possible uses have been proposed, such as generating quick reference skill lists, collector and weapon crafter items lists, and internal-use maintenance lists of various sorts. The alternative options for these tasks involve either a far greater effort from the editors (such as manually maintaining different articles with all this redundant data), or are considerably more hostile towards new contributors (such as the GuildWiki way of handling these lists, where each skill had its data located in a separate template instead of the skill article itself).

What else uses it: Many Wikimedia projects, such as Metawiki, all Wikinews projects, all Wikiquote, all Wikibooks, the English and German Wiktionary. Wikia runs two copies of DynamicPageList on its wikis, the vanilla DPL and a modified version which produces forum-like output. More sites running DPL can be found in this list.

Possible pitfalls: Additional server load may be an issue with extremely intricate queries. Additional configuration variables are available to limit the complexity of these queries and/or completely disable specific parameters, if the necessity arises. We believe that the default values for all these variables are appropriate for the tasks for which we are planning to use DPL here on the wiki.