Here's my take on it: From the design perspective, SpecialPages are superior. It's one of the most mature controlling units in MediaWiki, primarily because current special pages do so many complex things there has developed a need for abstraction that handles many use cases. Actions, on the other hand, are on the verge of deprecation. In fact, many of the Actions in MediaWiki right now are literally fancy wrappers for function calls on an Article object.
However, from the URI perspective, Actions make sense. Since the information is directly related to the page, having the page's URI as the base makes logical sense. It's much better for the forms for deleting a page to be at http://mywiki/wiki/MyPage?action=delete then for it to be at http://mywiki/wiki/Special:Delete/MyPage, because the delete action is something be applied to the page, not the other way around. With that in mind, I strongly recommend using a SpecialPage, because the infrastructure is better and eventually plans will be implemented to make the URI scheme for page-centric special pages more logical. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Chad <innocentkil...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:46 AM, Jeroen De Dauw <jeroended...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Hey, > > > > At the risk of starting an emacs vs vim like discussion, I'd like to ask > if > > I ought to be using a SpecialPage or an Action in my use case. I want to > > have an extra tab for a specific type of article that shows some > additional > > information about this article. This view is per article. It does not > allow > > for making modifications to the article. Registering either an action or > a > > special page will result in much the same behaviour for the user, with > the > > exception of the URL structure, which is slightly different. For me as a > > developer there also is little difference, either I have some thing > derive > > from Action and have 3 lines of code in it or from SpecialPage and have > the > > lines here. Furthermore I've seen both approaches taken, and have taken > > both myself. So is one approach preferred? > > > > Special page, special page, special page. Actions suck. > > -Chad > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
