Patching MediaWiki for fun and profit

Inspired by Peter Saint-Andre’s blog post, we decided to patch MediaWiki to make it recognize the spotify: URI scheme. (And we threw xmpp: in there as well, because we use it internally for instant messaging.)

First we added spotify: and xmpp: lines to the $wgUrlProtocols array in LocalSettings.php:

$wgUrlProtocols = array(
        ’http://’,
        ’https://’,
        ’spotify:’,
        ’xmpp:’,
        ’ftp://’,
        ’irc://’,
        ’gopher://’,
        ’telnet://’, // Well if we’re going to support the above.. -Ævar
        ’nntp://’, // @bug 3808 RFC 1738
        ’worldwind://’,
        ’mailto:’,
        ’news:’,
        ’file:’
);

See also the MediaWiki manual!

Then we added some styling to MediaWiki:Common.css to get the nice icons:

#bodyContent a[href ^="spotify:"],
.link-spotify {
    background: url(”spotify-external-link-tag-icon.png”) center right no-repeat;
    padding-right: 11px;
}

#bodyContent a[href ^="xmpp:"],
.link-xmpp {
    background: url(”xmpp-external-link-tag-icon.png”) center right no-repeat;
    padding-right: 11px;
}

And we uploaded these icons:   

This is the result:

Nice, huh? Well, it’s Friday after all.