UOGuide Forum

Hi,

I was just looking at some monster page and thought how cool it would be to have a list ordered by the amount of fame a monster gives.

So the question is:
Would it be possible to generate lists of articles sorted by the value of a certain field?

Would also be nice to sort weapons by swing speed and so forth.

I don't think this is possible without special extensions. It would probably be easier for someone to simply create a list manually. There are only a couple hundred monsters. Start up a spreadsheet, enter the name and creature, then sort by fame column.

Ok, that does sound like a lot of work. Especially to pay attention that it doesn outdate.

It should be possible to make something like that automatically - mediawiki stores everything in an sql database after all. I'll keep an eye open for a suitable extension mediawiki thankfully doesn't make it very hard to include those.

While everything is stored in a database, articles are stored as one large piece of text. Monster statistics are not sorted in their own columns, which would allow for easy sorting by an attribute such as fame.

Semantic MediaWiki allows this functionality (and in fact is expressly designed to do that), but the administrators have to install it.

It's as simple as dropping the extension into a folder and adding 2 or 3 lines to LocalSettings... but public access to the server has to be postponed while the administrators open Special:SMWAdmin and run the initialization to update the SQL tables and such.

It's definitely a big help in terms of sorting, though.

EDIT:

What Semantic MediaWiki does is allow you to specify variables (Properties) attached to an article and then query for those values and generate a page based on them.

So for instance, on the monster page you would put [[Fame::1400]] and it will set a variable "Fame" on the article at 1400.

You can later request a list of all articles that have their Fame set to anything, and tell it to sort by Fame.

In fact, it can automatically generate a table listing every monster's name, STR, INT, DEX, Fame, Karma, etc., and without changing the page you can sort by any of those.

Thank you for informing us about this extension Draco. If the rest of the UOGuide staff agrees that this would be a useful extension to install then it can be done.

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