Two handy MediaWiki extensions

Your wiki template (call it Template:Tasty) might look like this:

  ==Term==
  {{{Term}}}
  ===Definition and Picture===
  {{{Definition}}}
  http://example.com/{{{image}}}
  [[Category:{{{Tag}}}[[

The final part of the wiki2csv tool is the job file, which contains all the information necessary to update your wiki from content in a single CSV file. Fields in the job file include the source file, the wiki URL, username, and password, the separator (defaults to commas, but you can use a tab or any regular expression), the title of the article, and the template name. One tricky thing is that the title of the article in the example above would be the value 0, as opposed to 1, even though it is the first column in the spreadsheet. To import the example CSV file above, the job file (let’s call it tasty.txt) would look like this:

  csv: tasty.csv
  wiki: http://example.com/wiki/index.php
  user: username
  pass: password
  title: 0
  template: Tasty

To run this import, run the command perl csv2wiki.pl tasty.txt

Using this tool, you can quickly import content from a variety of sources, provided you have converted it into a CSV file first. In my testing, csv2wiki upload more than 4,000 articles from a spreadsheet containing more than 20 columns in about an hour.

csv2wiki is available only from its author at Organicdesign.co.nz, or from WikiExpert.com. Due to the power of this tool, you must provide a compelling case in order to get a user ID that lets you download the script, but once you do, it’s free. Full documentation and support is available to those willing to pay for it.

Pdf_Book

Our second tool is Pdf_Book, a MediaWiki extension that can create a PDF book, complete with an automatically generated table of contents and page numbers, from a category or list of articles on your wiki. If you want to create a PDF from only a single article, you should use the extension PDF Export instead, which appears as a link in your wiki’s toolbox for easy conversion of any given article.

Pdf_Book will include images embedded in your articles, and allows markup to force custom pagebreaks for you. On the down side, it is a fairly complex extension to install and configure, but once you are done, the payoff makes it worth your time. To use either the Pdf_book or PDF_Export extension on your wiki, you first need to install Htmldoc, which does all the grunt work of converting an HTML document into PDF. You may also need to increase the amount of RAM allocated to PHP in your php.ini file; the extension’s author recommends at least 64MB. Finally, be aware that the extension does not create content from subcategories. Deeper levels are currently done from heading levels within articles only.

Once you have the extension installed, you can create a PDF book from any category simply by appending &action=pdfbook to the end of the URL of that category: for example, http://www.example.com/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Test&action=pdfbook. You can do this manually, or you can create a template that generates the link, and include that template in your category pages to give users a link to download the contents of an entire category as a PDF ebook with a single click.

With csv2wiki and Pdf_Book, your wiki can quickly grow in size, and you can impress your users (or your boss) with powerful features that let you create manuals or ebooks from content that needs to be downloaded or distributed as an ebook or PDF file.

Every Monday we highlight a different extension, plugin, or add-on. Write an article of less than 1,000 words telling us about one that you use and how it makes your work easier, along with tips for getting the most out of it. If we publish it, we’ll pay you $100. (Send us a query first to be sure we haven’t already published a story on your chosen topic recently or have one in hand.)