Help:Dynamic Page List

Notice: The following documents an advanced technical topic in the creation of MediaWiki documents and listings. We ask that you do not attempt to engage in this area without speaking to staff in the Discord.

We use a MediaWiki extension called DynamicPageList3^[1] aka just DynamicPageList or DPL (third version of the DPL concept^[2]) to create indexes and listings throughout the site.

Best documentation for the project is at Gamepedia: Documentation at Gamepedia Help Wiki

Performance

DPL's code execution and database access is typically fast for typical category and article look ups, but we do need to be mindful that adding functionality can negatively affect the overhead of the server and load times of the page on which it is being used.

These things all add to performance cost:

Number of DPL items on a page
Amount of searchable Pages
Amount of pages to be returned
Amount of data to be returned
Whether or not it has to return stuff from a infobox. (Include statements, extending the list of returned data past the title.)
Using loose LIKE and REGEXP match parameters and/or requesting large data sets can result in long database access times.^[3]

References

[1] MediaWiki Project Home

[2] Wikipedia Master page describing the different extensions

[3] MediaWiki Extension:DynamicPageList3#Performance

[1]

[2]

[3]

Performance

See Also

References