The Best MediaWiki Extensions

MediaWiki is an extremely extensible CMS due to its architecture and backend technologies. MediaWiki extensions are collections of code and resources that can change the functionality, behavior, or appearance of the entire site or its components. The number of extensions listed on mediawiki.org is over 1,500 and growing.

Common Issues With MediaWiki Extensions

The MediaWiki core is under active development. Some extensions may become incompatible with the new core as breaking changes happen quite often. Some features previously available through extensions may become part of the core and render the extension obsolete.

Extensions need to be maintained and adapted to newer versions of MediaWiki or underlying software such as PHP. Extension maintainers are people: they can be busy, lazy, or focused on other priorities. As a result, extensions can become abandoned, outdated, superseded by other extensions.

Therefore, extensions for your wiki should be chosen carefully, taking into account not only functionality, but also factors such as stability, reliable documentation, and regular maintenance. The right place to check all these aspects is the extension page on mediawiki.org.

What MediaWiki Extension Is The Best One?

Extensions are implementing something. If an extension does its job perfectly, it is the best one for the purpose. The WikiTeq docker image, for example, contains over a hundred handpicked extensions, extensively tested to work with the latest LTS version of MediaWiki.

For the review, we have selected extensions of a completely different scale and scope, all well documented and maintained.

MediaWiki Extensions Improving Your Workflow

Extension: InputBox

By default, MediaWiki does not provide an input or form to create new pages. Instead, pages are primarily created using “red links” in other pages’ text or in search results (we have a separate blog on page creation here). This may puzzle many novice users. The InputBox is designed to fill this gap by providing input for the new page name.

The code example and the resulting input for page creation.

It also includes creating new sections, pages in different namespaces, subpages. You can even create all of the above with preloaded content. Using inline parameters, you can change introductory texts, button labels, and text entry placeholder, as well as the position and color of input interface elements.

The inputbox code example and the resulting input with the preloaded summary and default text.

It is worth noting that the InputBox, in addition to the "create" mode, can work in the "search" mode and allows you to insert a search input in an arbitrary place on the wiki page.