The Treeview skin for MediaWiki

The Treeview skin was developed for the comp.lang.c newsgroup's MediaWiki-based wiki, clc-wiki.net, and has been publicly released in case anyone else finds it useful. You can see it in action on the clc wiki. The skin's main feature is to add hierarchical browsing of a MediaWiki-powered wiki's content through a treeview box in the left pane. It uses colons in the articles' titles to separate hierarchical components of each article's path, much like slashes are used to separate components of a filesystem path. It is most suited to small- to moderate-sized sites with a low edit frequency and with a MediaWiki cache manager enabled. It has a feedback page at the Planning:Treeview skin:Feedback article on clc-wiki.net; you can also contact me about it privately.

Maintenance-only mode

For some time now, I have not worked on this project other than to maintain it by fixing bugs, either those of my own making, or those of incompatibility with newer versions of MediaWiki's core code. I expect this maintenance-only mode to be the case going forwards too, unless someone else gets excited about it and starts contributing.

Undocumented limitation: not mobile-friendly

Be warned: this skin was developed and lapsed into maintenance-only mode prior to (a need for) recognition of the importance of mobile devices on the internet, and so it does not render well on mobile devices. In buzzword speak, it is not a "responsive design".

Documentation

The "Help:Treeview skin*" documents below are as distributed with the skin in the mediawiki/skins/treeview/help_articles directory. Here they have been converted from wikitext to HTML. Also listed are the main README and a how-to.

Download

1.6.8, released 23 December 2017

Updated for compatibility with MediaWiki 1.29.2 and 1.30.
Removed the small grey/green LED which hid a drop-down menu for logging in, creating accounts, as well as for the user links when logged in. These links are now displayed across the top of the page, as they originally were in the Monobook skin on which this skin is based. This was requested and is much more user-friendly.

1.6.7 beta, released 29 November 2014

Updated for compatibility with MediaWiki 1.24.0. Note that skins/treeview has become skins/Treeview, and that Treeview.php is now located at skins/Treeview/Treeview.php rather than skins/Treeview.php as originally.

1.6.6 beta, released 3 February 2014

Fixes a major IE 7 display glitch.
Fixes a few minor bugs in the generation of treeview node links.
Adds a "showpages" parameter to CATEGORY directives.
Fixes a bug with CATEGORY directives whereby if the top-level category had no content (had not been edited) then sub-categories would not be shown in the tree.

1.6.5 beta, released 14 August 2012

Re-capitalises the 'Treeview' message key because current versions of MediaWiki seem to auto-capitalise articles in the MediaWiki namespace.
Corrects the code so that node images are now once again output.
Avoids a few E_STRICT warnings.

1.6.4 beta, released 3 July 2012

Upgrades the skin for compatibility with MediaWiki 1.19.* and 1.18.* (untested on 1.17.*). These changes are in all likelihood backwards incompatible: i.e. this version of the skin most probably won't work on earlier versions of MediaWiki.
Adds a rel="nofollow" attribute to links in the treeview to stop search engines (esp. Google) from retrieving the page's content many times - once for each permutation of expanded and collapsed nodes passed in the URL's query parameters.
Makes various other minor fixes.

1.6.3 beta, released 7 September 2011

Fixes a bug with image uploads (a method name changed in newer versions of MediaWiki).
Adds static declarations as appropriate to avoid E_STRICT warnings about non-static methods being called statically.

1.6.2 beta, released 7 June 2011

Fixes a fatal bug with the wrong declaration of the argument to initPage() in Treeview.php.
Adds static declarations as appropriate to avoid E_STRICT warnings about non-static methods being called statically.

1.6.1 beta, released 30 October 2010

Fixes a fatal bug: parameter one of wfHierarchy_SkinTemplateTabsHook() should not have had a preceding ampersand; this caused the skin to break on MW 1.16.0.

1.6 beta, released 1 October 2010

Makes some changes for compatibility with the latest stable MediaWiki version (1.16.0). One of these changes is backwards-incompatible i.e. this version will not work with versions of MediaWiki earlier than 1.16.0 without a tweak.
Fixes a few small bugs.

1.5 beta, released 25 March 2010

Fixes display glitches on both Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome.
Makes some changes for compatibility with the latest stable MediaWiki versions (1.15.x).

1.4 beta, released 22 September 2008

Adds the "showtitle" and "showthis" parameters to the <treeview> tag.
Adds conditional styling for Internet Explorer 7.
Fixes several bugs.

1.3 beta, released 6 May 2007

Adds a <treeview> tag to display the hierarchy as a nested list in a wiki page.
Fixes a bug: the default Treeview configuration message was not readable using the MediaWiki 1.9 series due to the forced conversion to lowercase of the first character of the message key. NB the fix was to change the default configuration message from "Treeview" to "treeview", so if upgrading then please move your configuration article.

1.2 beta, released 28 March 2007

Fixes one bug: load-on-demand of nodes was failing for titles using extended character sets such as Cyrillic.

1.1 beta, released 22 March 2007

Fixes three bugs: node sorting, edit box formatting buttons displaying and inclusion of Opera and KHTML css files.

1.0 beta, released 1 February 2007

Initial public release.