User:Mike.lifeguard/Wish list
Wikibooks uses the MediaWiki software, which was developed for Wikipedia. As such, it's not strictly intended for use in writing textbooks. Here is a technical wish list for Wikibooks to help with some of these shortcomings:
- "Search this book" feature being a special page, not a link to a google search
- Per-book stylesheets (although we could just as easily do that in javascript, it might be nice to have the javascript added to the core MW distribution)
- Book organizational meta-pages. A page where you could specify the layout for a book, and it would then generate an automatic TOC, and automatic forward/backward links, etc. darklama can probably explain this idea better then I can
- List of books. Like the special page Special:Allpages, but would only list the main page of a book, not all pages.
- A read-only Wikijunior domain (already registered) - a read only storage location for all stable book versions, which could be updated from Wikibooks when necessary
- The GNU Lilypond extension, for music and other types of displays (we've asked many times, and never got them because of technical reasons)
- PDF generator (currently hosted on the toolserver, but needs much work)
- An automatic TOC-generator tool. Several people have asked how to create new pages; this would help with that by providing a TOC of redlinks for them to work on, and would also foster greater organization of new books right from the get-go.
- Watching pages in bundles (ie per-book watchlists) bugzilla:12308, bugzilla:2308 and bugzilla:1710
By priority:
- Search by book (should be easy to do)
- Good PDF (and/or print version) generation (requires lots of work, and is probably difficult to do properly)
- List of top-level pages in the mainspace (ie books) (should be easy to do)
- TOC generator-thing (should be easy to do, but we can function just fine without it)
- per-book styles (most important thing to do requiring some work)
- Read-only or other quality control (needs lots of discussion before anything else)