MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up 2009/Notes/Backend

  • Day/Time: Friday 4 to 6
  • Topic: Backend
  • Session leader: Tim Starling
  • Participants: Emil, Mikael, David, Domas, Mark, DaB, Haiko, Stu

Notes:

  • Parser
    • Potential reusers, e.g. PediaPress, want to know how to split the MW parser from MW, and to do fun things with it like template annotation and suppression.
    • Legacy markup issues exist, e.g. interaction between preprocessor and main pass
    • Templates are ugly and slow, Lua would be nice
  • Documentation
    • The usual bug #1 complaints
    • A made-for-purpose translation interface similar to translatewiki.net would be nice. Manuals need to be translated.
  • Performance
    • Extension startup is slow, especially when you have 100 extensions
    • Message cache overhall: loading i18n messages is extremely slow, and can be improved by many orders of magnitude with efficient coding.
    • Static files (CSS/JS) need to be compressed for HTTP transport
    • Some bugs and sysadmin issues when using multiple database servers