Extension:POD

**MediaWiki extensions manual**
POD; Release status: unmaintained
Implementation	Tag
Description	Render POD (Plain Old Documentation) input as HTML
Author(s)	Tels~mediawikiwikitalk
Latest version	0.06 (2007-05-05)
MediaWiki	1.6.3+
License	Released under the GPL
Download	search.cpan.org; README; CHANGES

What can this extension do?

This extension takes input in POD format, and converts it to HTML. Thus you can edit POD inside a wiki, and directly see the result.

This ties together several tools and creates a sort of IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for POD:

Browser

The browser supplies:

the HTML-rendering,
clickable links,
spell-checking

Pod-Extension

By using Pod::Simple and some custom transformations, it brings:

instant POD check for correctness
correct formatting in HTML and working links
keyword display
collapsable table of contents
language selection (for multi-language documents)

The Wiki

central storage,
version control,
user management,
visual diffs

Usage

Type your POD text between pod tags:

<pod>
=head1 NAME

=head2 Some Headline

This is a test.
</pod>

Custom POD

You can also embed custom POD paragraphs like the following:

=begin graph

graph { flow: down; }
node { fill: thistle; }
[ POD | POD (graph) ] { basename: pod; }

[ pod.0 ] -- Mediawiki::POD --> [ HTML ] { fill: lavender; size: 2,0; }
[ pod.1 ] -- Graph::Easy --> [ HTML ]

=end graph

which will be rendering as "image" (either HTML, SVG, or PNG).

Installation

Download the extension from http://search.cpan.org/~tels/Mediawiki-POD, and install it into according to the README file.

PHP 4.x vs. 5.x

Th extension was developed and tested with PHP 4.x. If you are using Mediawiki 1.8.x or better, then you are also using PHP 5.x. In this case you need to modify the extension, as it uses proc_open(), which was sadly changed in an incompatible way between PHP versions.

Notes under 5.1.2

I had no problem with proc_open().
however I did get a "variable undefined" warning at line 57. This can be fixed by initialising $output in renderPOD(); just bafore

while (!feof($pipes[1])) {

(line 56) add:

$output='';

Parameters

This extension doesn't take any parameters except the input text between <pod> and </pod>.

Changes to LocalSettings.php

Add this line to your LocalSettings.php:

 include_once('extensions/POD.php');

POD Release status: unmaintained
Implementation	Tag
Description	Render POD (Plain Old Documentation) input as HTML
Author(s)	Tels~mediawikiwiki^talk
Latest version	0.06 (2007-05-05)
MediaWiki	1.6.3+
License	Released under the GPL
Download	search.cpan.org README CHANGES