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Understanding MediaWiki’s Hook System for Extension Development When you first peek at MediaWiki’s source you’ll notice a curious pattern: scattered Hooks::run calls, each paired with a string like ArticleSaveComplete or UserLoginComplete. Those are the beating heart of the extension ecosystem. In plain English, a “hook” is

What is CirrusSearch? If you’ve ever tried to hunt for a specific phrase on a wiki with a gazillion pages, you know the built‑in search can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. CirrusSearch changes that story. It hooks MediaWiki up to Elasticsearch (soon OpenSearch) and

Why automate MediaWiki upkeep? Running a wiki is like keeping a garden alive – you water the plants, pull the weeds, and occasionally trim the hedges. If you wait for a weekend binge‑watch session to pop up on the calendar and then scramble to run updateSpecialPages.php or a rebuildData.

Why “just another tweak” never cuts it for MediaWiki Ever opened a wiki page and felt the load bar crawl like a snail on a rainy day? You’re not alone. The thing about MediaWiki is that it stacks layers of caching like a lasagna – if one layer is soggy,

Why the MediaWiki API Matters for Your Project Ever stared at a wiki page and thought, “There’s got to be a better way to pull this data into my own app?” You’re not alone. The MediaWiki Action API is the hidden doorway that lets you treat a wiki

Why Templates Matter in MediaWiki When you first dive into a MediaWiki installation it’s easy to think that every page has to be typed out from scratch. In practice that quickly turns into a nightmare of copy‑paste, broken links, and inconsistent styling. Templates are the answer – reusable snippets

Picture this: you’ve just finished a massive data dump from a legacy system, and you need to push thousands of rows into a wiki

Why parser functions matter in modern MediaWiki templating When you first encounter MediaWiki’s templating it feels a bit like opening a toolbox where most of the tools are hidden behind curly braces. You can get a simple infobox up and running with a handful of parameters, but as soon

Picture this: you’re editing a page, and suddenly a tiny script pops up, churning out tables, calculating dates, or even fetching data from a remote API – all without a single line of PHP in sight. That, dear reader, is the magic of Scribunto.