Page Forms

Extension: Page Forms

all extensions

Overview
Description: Forms for creating and editing wiki pages
State: stable Dependency: MediaWiki
Developer: Yaron Koren, Stephan Gambke, and others License: GPL v2+
Type: MediaWiki Category: Content Structuring
Edition: BlueSpice pro, BlueSpice Farm"BlueSpice Farm" is not in the list (BlueSpice free, BlueSpice free (deactivated), BlueSpice pro, BlueSpice pro (deactivated), BlueSpice farm, BlueSpice farm (deactivated), BlueSpice cloud, BlueSpice cloud (deactivated)) of allowed values for the "BSExtensionInfoEdition" property., BlueSpice Cloud"BlueSpice Cloud" is not in the list (BlueSpice free, BlueSpice free (deactivated), BlueSpice pro, BlueSpice pro (deactivated), BlueSpice farm, BlueSpice farm (deactivated), BlueSpice cloud, BlueSpice cloud (deactivated)) of allowed values for the "BSExtensionInfoEdition" property. Version: 4.1+

Features

Page Forms (known until November 2016 as Semantic Forms) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows users to add, edit and query data using forms.

It was originally created as an offshoot of the Semantic MediaWiki extension to be able to edit templates that store their parameters via SMW. However, it can now also work with the alternative Cargo extension, or with neither extension installed.

Very simply, Page Forms allows you to have forms for creating and editing pages on your wiki, as well as for querying data, all without any programming. Forms can be created and edited not just by administrators, but by users themselves.

The main components of Page Forms functionality are form definition pages, which exist in a separate namespace, 'Form:'. These are pages consisting of markup code which gets parsed when a user goes to a form. Since forms are defined strictly through these definition pages, users can themselves create and modify forms, without the need for any actual programming.

The Page Forms extension is mostly used to add and edit calls to infobox-style templates within pages. A form allows a user to populate a pre-defined set of templates, as well as page sections, for any page; if Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki are used, the data within the templates can then be stored and queried.

Forms can also be used to edit the data in an existing page, and you can enable an "⧼formedit⧽" tab to show up on any page.

Page Forms also supports autocompletion of fields, so users can easily see what the previously-entered values were for a given field. This greatly helps to avoid issues of naming ambiguity, spelling, etc.

Data in a page that doesn't fit into the form, like a free-form text description of the page's subject, isn't ignored when the page is edited with a form; rather, it is placed into a separate input box called "free text".

Page Forms also includes a wide variety of other functionality related to forms.

Accessibility

Test status: 2-testing complete
Checked for: Web, Authoring tool
Last test date: 2022-08-05
WCAG level: AA
WCAG support: partially supports (workaround: no)
Comments:

some input types are not keyboard or screenreader accessible. E.g., tokens, bs-msvisualeditor.

Standard input elements such as text fields, drop downs, textareas, etc. are accessible. Therefore, accessible forms can be created.

Extension type: extended
Extension focus: editor