Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-5811199-20200116121925

Andrewds1021 wrote: I am thinking of having a special block that users can insert if they actually need wikitext. ... As far as I am aware, HTML is HTML regardless of how it is generated. So I don't quite understand you point about Discussions not using PHP. Having blocks of wikitext would be an interesting idea... though something tells me some people will just have their whole post be wikitext :P

I mentioned PHP because I suspected that the current versions of MW have optimisations that make parsing wikitext super quick. Perhaps they store the content in both wikitext and HTML? This might not transfer well into the structure that's being used in Discussions, and because it's in JS, those optimisations that have been developed by the MW dev teams for years in PHP probably aren't going to translate quickly into a new platform.

Andrewds1021 wrote: If that is the case, are extensions (ex. DPL (third party, i.e. the one Wikia uses), CategoryTree, Variables, Loops) keeping up? If so, how? Is it just a massive rewriting effort each time? I think they all keep up because they have much more people and volunteers to maintain all the different extensions, and all of them are actively used in Wikipedia. When a new MW version is released, only minor changes are needed and there's time and the ability to run and test locally. This is less possible for Wikia. I suspect there are tests that are automatically run as well, whenever there's a release (though I couldn't find them when I looked around).

But if we're going from 1.19 to 1.34, and it's a custom Wikia extension, that's a lot more work that needs to go into figuring what's changed since then and what adjustments would need to be made. Have a look at DPL - since 2015 (when 1.19 was depreciated), you've got 38 changes - "101 changed files with 7,363 additions and 6,379 deletions". That's a lot of lines, but they had that done over the 5 years. Imagine Forums.