WikiDB

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This extension is currently installed on this wiki. Feel free to experiment with it!
WikiDB icon.png

WikiDB is a MediaWiki extension which can be used to add database functionality to your wiki. Its core principal is to do this whilst still following a wiki-like workflow for creating and managing data. Data is therefore defined in-page via the standard editing process and, just as you can create links to pages that don't exist, you can put data into a table that doesn't exist, and you are able to display and query that data without requiring any formal structure to be defined.

By creating a table definition, however, you get to force fields to a certain data-type, define fields as aliases of each other (e.g. if different articles use a different name to refer to the same field) and easily flag up unexpected fields that may have been added in error. Changing the field definition instantly updates all data output on the wiki, however the original data is left unmodified. This means that schema changes will never result in data being lost or corrupted.

Because WikiDB allows you to define data on any page, the data can be located directly within the article it relates to. It is therefore easy to find, and there is no problem ensuring it stays up-to-date as the article changes. By default, WikiDB hides the raw data at the point that it is defined, on the assumption that you will output it in aggregated form elsewhere. However you also have the option of outputting it in a standard tabular form or to pass the fields as parameters to a template for in-line display (so if your wiki makes extensive use of infoboxes, it will be easy to update it so this data goes into a table as well).

For more information, see the documentation, below.

News

Download WikiDB Here!
Installation instructionsCHANGELOGOlder versions

v5.1.4 released

This release provides two compatibility fixes for MW >= 1.34.

v5.1.3 released

This release provides a number of compatibility fixes. These resolve issues introduced in recent MediaWiki releases, as well as a couple of issues for old releases that were spotted during testing.

-- HappyDog (talk) 12:35, 27 January 2024 (GMT)

v5.1.2 released

This new release resolves a few issues relating to MediaWiki 1.38, as well as fixing an issue with the parsing of query criteria.

-- HappyDog (talk) 23:08, 2 August 2022 (BST)

v5.1.1 released

This is a bug-fix release to resolve a fatal error on MediaWiki 1.37.

-- HappyDog (talk) 18:54, 11 March 2022 (GMT)

v5.1.0 released

As well as fixing a number of breakages introduced by MediaWiki 1.37, this release has a cool new feature: Multi-value fields.

Multi-value fields provide a simple way of implementing what would normally be called many-to-many relationships to reference data. For example, if a Student may be in multiple Courses, you can now specify more than one value for the Course column when defining data to go into the Student table.

See the updated documentation for full details about this new feature and, as ever, check the release notes for full details of changes made in this release.

-- HappyDog (talk) 22:55, 7 February 2022 (GMT)

v5.0.0 released

I am pleased to announce the release of WikiDB v5.0.0. This is the first release to use the new versioning scheme.

See the release notes for full details.

One major change is that this release drops support for MediaWiki < 1.16. I have always striven to maximise the compatibility of my extensions, and up until now WikiDB has proudly supported all MediaWiki versions back to v1.7. However, some of the features of WikiDB have been impossible to support in older MediaWiki versions, so for some time now there has been a minimum requirement of MediaWiki 1.16 in order to experience the full set of features that WikiDB provides.

As I continue to add features to the extension, I am increasingly finding that there are things which are not possible without the parser rewrite that came in MediaWiki 1.16. Therefore, rather than spending my energies trying to wring as much functionality as possible out of these older versions, I decided to raise my minimum version requirement for the extension to 1.16 and above.

This is a very conservative step - MediaWiki 1.16 was released in 2010 and is no longer officially supported. However, as yet, I have not encountered any features that I need for WikiDB which are not supported by this version of MediaWiki, and therefore I see no reason to raise the bar any higher at this time.

If there are any users of MediaWiki < 1.16 who are unable to upgrade, the older versions of WikiDB remain available.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

--HappyDog (talk) 20:57, 30 March 2019 (GMT)

Documentation

MediaWiki logo.png
This extension is also documented at
Extension:WikiDB
on MediaWiki.org.

If the pages are not in sync. then this version on my test wiki is always the most up-to-date.


Technical Info

  • Unit testing - Information about the unit tests included in the extension, including how to run them on your own wiki.
  • Tables - Details about the database tables that will be created by the extension.