MediaWiki customization

Links

 * MediaWiki Customization at mediawiki.org

Articles

 * modifying MediaWiki menus
 * shortening MediaWiki URLs
 * add a new navigation box to MediaWiki
 * modifying the MediaWiki searchbox
 * MediaWiki user-group security
 * MediaWiki extensions: custom coding using MW's built-in extensibility

Managed Customization
MediaWiki will include the contents of mediawiki:Common.css, if found, in the CSS code it uses for defining the appearance of its pages. (The initial character in "Common" does not seem to be case-sensitive, even if the site has the initial-caps flag turned off.)

Code Notes
(From Woozle 20:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT). Eventually to be given their own section, I expect.)
 * Everything obviously starts with index.php
 * For the purpose of displaying a page (not saving changes or doing anything else), this calls $wgArticle->view, in Article.php (line 699)
 * $wgArticle->view appears to be able to provide a few other formats besides the regular view (including difference engine and displaying redirections as subtitles), but I'm ignoring that for now
 * $wgOut seems to be the object which accumulates text to be output, via various methods:
 * $wgOut->addWikiText(...)
 * $wgOut->addHTML(...)
 * $wgOut->addPrimaryWikiText # Display content and save to parser cache
 * $wgOut->addWikiText # Display content, don't attempt to save to parser cache
 * $wgOut->setPageTitle
 * $wgOut->transformBuffer; # Put link titles into the link cache
 * $wgOut->addMetaTags; # Add link titles as META keywords
 * ...and then it does these two lines:
 * $this->viewUpdates; (found at line 1926 -- doesn't do much)
 * wfProfileOut( $fname );
 * It's not clear whether the navbar has already been pulled in by the time we hit viewUpdates -- possibly transformBuffer does it? The comment makes it sound like that, but the name "transformBuffer" in that case is not very descriptive. The code in there should probably be examined.