Jeroens blog

Over the past 3 weeks I’ve been working on a new MediaWiki extension that allows creation of on-wiki surveys by admins. It comes with a whole bunch of neat features, and is the most awesome (code wise) extensions I’ve created so far.It’s aptly titled Survey.

Feature overview

• Surveys get displayed to wiki users using a nice pop-up form.
• Surveys can be created and modified via an admin panel (Special:Surveys).
• Surveys can be shown to specific types of users (logged in, anonymous, editor, confirmed, …)
• Surveys can be shown for a specified percentage of users, and only after a certain amount of page views.
• Survey questions can have different types of inputs, of which some allow restricting answers.
• Surveys can be tested by admins via Special:TakeSurvey without them being live on the wiki.
• Summaries of survey submissions can be found on Special:SurveyStats.
• The survey submission data (ie user answers) can be exported via an API.

Requirements

Survey makes use of many new features introduced in MediaWiki 1.17, and therefore requires this version or later. It even makes use of MW 1.18 features, with fallback code for MW 1.17 It also makes use of 5.3 features, these being late static binding and anonymous functions, so it won’t work with PHP 5.2.x and earlier.

Some screenshots

Special:Surveys: the main administration interface for Surveys

Special:EditSurvey: administration interface to create and edit surveys

Example of a survey as it appears to users

Special:SurveyStats: summarizes the submissions for a single survey

Downloads

• Survey release downloads
• Survey SVN tags
• Survey SVN trunk

Some background

I developed the Survey extension as WikiWorks consultant for the IEEE, with some help from Yaron Koren.

What’s next?

There are many many features that can be added to this extension to make it even more awesome. I’d like to get some initial feedback on version 0.1, so the usability issues and bugs that might be there can be ironed out. Please place any feedback you might have on the discussion page. This initial release contains all the features my client needed, so if you want to have new capabilities added and can fund the work, definitely contact me

Yesterday I released version 1.0.3 of the Maps and Semantic Maps MediaWiki extensions. This release re-introduces Google Earth support, this time for Google Maps v3, and enhances the KML/KMZ support for this mapping service as well. Many thanks go to Jon Povey for funding the implementation of these features! Since I didn’t make any release announcements for 1.0.1 or 1.0.2, I’ll just include changes made in these versions as well, effectively treating this as the release after 1.0.

KML/KMZ support

The Google Maps v3 service now supports 2 new KML related parameters: kml and gkml. Both accept a url pointing to a KML (or KMLZ) file. The first one uses a KML parsing library (geoxml3) included in the extension to translate the features described in the KML file into elements to place onto the map. This is very nice for people that do not want to be dependent on third party services, but sadly enough, the library is somewhat limited. It lacks support for more advanced KML features such as polygons and paths. The gkml parameter uses Googles KML service, which pulls the KML file to some Google server, and then decides if it should be send to the client (for simple and small files), or if it should be rendered server side and send as tiles to the client (for big files or files containing advanced features such as polygons).

You can now also choose if you want the map to rezoom after the KML layers have been loaded or not using the kmlrezoom parameter. KML layers will load a bit after the map, since they require extra resources to be loaded, and there is no need to let the user wait to see the normal map until those are done loading.

Google Earth support

Maps already has support for Google Earth since on of it’s earliest versions. This was quite easy to achieve as Google Maps v2 natively supported it. Now with the switch to Google Maps v3 in Maps 1.0, people asked for Google Maps support in that as well. Unfortunately Google Earth is not natively supported here. Maps now provides support for GE using the Google Maps utility library v3. The earth type can be enabled by adding “earth” to the types parameter, or setting it as the default type using “type”. Do however note that due to this not being officially supported by Google, it has some deficiencies. For one, when switching to GE, the map controls won’t be displayed any more, preventing you from switching back. Also, the GE plugin is only supported on Windows and Mac, so won’t be usable for mobile or Linux users.

A completely new thing added in 1.0.3 is the tilt parameter, which, as you can probably guess, allows you to set the initial tilt of the GE layer.

Full list of changes since 1.0:

• Added support for Google Earth in Google Maps v3.
• Added tilt parameter for Google Earth in Google Maps v3.
• Added kmlrezoom parameter for Google Maps v3 and general $egMapsRezoomForKML setting.
• Added API module for geocoding.
• Added ‘geocoding’ right.
• Added language parameter to the mapsdoc hook.
• Use of Validator 0.4.10s setMessage method instead of setDescription for better i18n.
• Minor improvement to script loading.
• Fixed Google Maps v3 JavaScript issue occurring on MediaWiki 1.17.
• Fixed internationalization of distances (bug 30467).
• Fixed zoom and types parameters for Google Maps v3.

• Added geocodecontrol parameter for the form inputs.
• Fixed handling of the semantic link caption in the geographical coordinate datavalue class.

What’s next?

For now, I have no specific plans for changes or addition to either of the mapping extensions, further then some minor script loading improvements, as I ‘m working on several other projects. However it’s likely that people will have suggestions for new features at SMWCon Fall 2011, which is next week.

Download

• Maps downloads
• Maps and Semantic Maps downloads
• Maps SVN: tags, trunk
• Semantic Maps SVN: tags, trunk