Custom per user navigation portlet?

Custom per user navigation portlet
----------------------------------------------
Anyone done this?

Any ideas how to simply do it?

_Purpose
To allow users to bookmark site pages they often visit. So
they can 
create quick and deep navigation for their specific topic of
interest 
within a wide but deep focus wiki such as Wikiversity.org.

_Description
* Custom nav to appear in left sidebar below the Search box
   but above the Toolbox.
* Customized per logged-in user, such as how only user 
   Foo can edit User:Foo/monobook.css, maybe at
User:Foo/nav.
* Parsed like a normal wiki page instead of like
MediaWiki:Sidebar
   because normal users don't want to learn non-standard
markup.
* Other users could use Foo's custom nav portlet by 
   transcluding it into their own User:Name/nav by typing
there
   {{User:Foo/nav}}.
* Interest groups could collaboratively create and maintain
group
   specific custom nav portlets, eg
   Template:nav_English_as_a_second_language, to transclude
into 
   their interest group pages and or individual
User:Name/nav
   with {}.

_Current alternatives
Currently in standard MediaWiki a user Foo can put
"bookmarks" in
1. browser bookmarks
2. Links in User:Foo page or subpages thereof
3. Links in page Whatever for benefit of everyone
4. Category:Whatever page by labeling the page
[[Category:Whatever]]
5. Links in Template:Whatever

However, standard browser bookmarks are too messy as we all
know and 2, 
3, 4 and 5 are not as convenient to click as left sidebar
would be.

Deep wide wiki's such as Wikiversity.org and other deep wide
Open 
Educational Resources wiki's are a nuisance to navigate.

A *custom per user navigation portlet* could be an enormous
practical 
benefit to wiki's that have not just wide but also *deep*
topics, such 
as Wikiversity. Wikipedia only goes wide, not deep, and is
manageable 
because each encyclopedia page has a unique, language
defined, term or 
phrase that defines it as encyclopedic -- going deeper is
not an 
encyclopedia's mission but is the mission of many other
wikis.

Has anyone tried this?

Ideas how to simply write it in PHP as a MediaWiki
extension?


Thanks!
Happy New Year!

-- 
Roger Chrisman           
http://Wikigogy.org    -  
  free resources
                 for teachers of English as a second or
foreign language
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On 31/12/06, Roger Chrisman <rogerrogerchrisman.com>
wrote:
> Ideas how to simply write it in PHP as a MediaWiki
extension?

No, but I know how I'd approach it if I was hacking it into
the core;
abstract the existing sidebar builder, add some of the stuff
from
/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/robchurch/sidebar, make the
sidebar cache
more generic, add it to the skins and then test it.


Rob Church
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On 31/12/06, Roger Chrisman <rogerrogerchrisman.com>
wrote:

> Custom per user navigation portlet
> ----------------------------------------------
> Anyone done this?
> Any ideas how to simply do it?


A lot of people on en: Wikipedia use their own user page as
a
collection of handy links for themselves.


- d.
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