A Look Back at Our Work on Performance in 2023
A few months ago, we teased that we had a taskforce working on improving platform performance for all of our users. As we start to wind down the year, we wanted to take a moment to update you on those improvements and share the positive results that we’ve seen throughout 2023 to make the site work even better for all users. These are mighty but often unseen changes you may not have heard about or noticed, so we wanted to show you what our tech team has been hard at work on throughout 2023 – in addition to some of the improvements we’ve already made to wiki editing this year.
Let’s take a look at the results and see what we were able to accomplish to make the site perform better for our audiences.
- 1 Performance matters
- 2 Taskforce Assemble!
- 3 How …
Introducing Lua, for faster and more powerful templates
Hi, everyone! If you don't know me already, I'm Grunny and I'm a software engineer here at Wikia. I'm here to introduce Lua, a new templating language, which we'll be rolling out to all wikias in the near future. This will make it easier for you to create and modify templates such as infoboxes, navigation tables, and many others.
Most of you probably make use of templates on a regular basis. The MediaWiki platform upon which Wikia is built, makes use of special wikitext syntax such as parser functions to let you use logical operations and other features to build templates. The introduction of parser functions effectively turned wikitext into a limited programming language. While parser functions allow you to do many things in templates, com…
Introducing the Volunteer Developer Program
Hi, everyone! Today I would like to introduce you to a new initiative by Wikia: the Volunteer Developer Program.
Volunteer Developers are a group of users who have shown a high level of skill and interest in writing code for the Wikia platform. Many of you use some of their custom scripts every day, such as Chat Hacks. At the moment, they are four members strong: Monchoman45, TK-999, Sovq, and Sactage, but in the future we may recruit some other technically-minded users onto the team.
Starting today, they'll be helping out Wikia's engineering department by fixing bugs and committing them to Wikia's source code. This will not only help the engineers have more time to work on new features for you, but also give the volunteers valuable experienc…
Make yourself a Wikia-MacGyver: Adding custom scripts
Hi, everyone. If you don't know me already, I'm Grunny and I can often be found creating JavaScript tools to make tasks easier for the community. One of the most powerful (and fun!) aspects of MediaWiki is the fact that users can customise their own interface using CSS and JavaScript. Many people may not have any knowledge or experience with coding, but fear not, many tools are already available for you to use just by adding one or two lines to your user subpage.
One of the best places to have a look at for user scripts is the Wikia Developers Wiki where many helpful users have shared useful scripts they have created. I'm going to highlight a few of them here and let you know how you can install them for your own use.
A quick couple of terms …