November 7, 2005. CCNMTL programmers have developed two plug-ins that make it easier for MediaWiki users to add category tags to organize entries within their collaborative websites.

MediaWiki software is the engine that powers the Wikipedia. At Columbia, CCNMTL has deployed the MediaWiki for several courses, including the Social Justice Movements Wiki for Robin Kelley's "Black Movements in the U.S" and the University Writing Program's (UWP) Instructors' Resource Site. While creating their wiki pages, the UWP instructors realized that they needed a more user-friendly way to organize pages within the site. The new Category Editor plug-in adds a menu of existing categories from which a user can select the appropriate category in which the wiki page that they are editing should be associated, and the Category Search plug-in makes it easy to find articles that are associated with certain categories. Contributing these plug-ins to the open source community helps improve the MediaWiki software, making it easier for multiple participants to collaboratively develop and edit a site.

See the Category Plug-in page at SourceForge.Net.

See a screenshot of the Category Editor plug-in.