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Why Hooks Matter in MediaWiki Ever stumbled on a wiki that just does what you need, without you having to poke around the core files? That’s not magic – it’s hooks at work. In MediaWiki, hooks are the quiet backstage crew that let you slip in custom logic right

If you’ve ever scratched your head over why a simple page‑save sometimes triggers a cascade of actions, you’ve already bumped into the world of hooks

Why “just look at the error message” rarely works MediaWiki is a tangled stack of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and caching layers. A fatal PHP notice on line 42 of SpecialPage.php may actually be the downstream symptom of a missing extension hook that fires earlier in the request. In short,

Why Parser Functions Matter When you first open a MediaWiki page you probably see static text, tables, and maybe a handful of links. Yet behind those simple symbols lies a tiny programming language that lets the wiki behave like a lightweight web‑app. Those are the parser functions. They aren’

When you glance at a Wikipedia page you probably never think about the invisible machinery that decides whether a table shows a footnote or a badge pops up next to a name

What Scribunto Actually Does At its core Scribunto is the bridge that lets a MediaWiki install run Lua code inside the parser. The extension ships with a lightweight sandbox (either LuaStandalone or LuaSandbox) and gives you the #invoke parser function. When a template writes {{#invoke:MyModule|myFunction|arg1|arg2}} the

Why Scribunto Matters in 2025 Ever stumbled upon a Wikipedia template that seemed to do magic, pulling data from dozens of pages without a single line of wikitext? That sorcery is usually powered by Scribunto, the MediaWiki extension that lets you embed Lua scripts right inside a wiki. As of

Why Cargo Matters in a Wiki‑Driven World Ever opened a Wikipedia page and thought, “That infobox is just a pile of text with a fancy layout”? In truth, those boxes hide rows of data that can be queried, sorted, and repurposed—if you have the right tool. Cargo, a

Why MediaWiki Needs a Media Boost Ever opened a wiki page and stared at a dead‑weight .mp4 link that just refused to play? You’re not alone. For years the core MediaWiki software treated audio and video like any other file – a downloadable blob, not a streaming experience. The