This course jumps into the deep end of the pool; we are going to go over every essential aspect of MediaWiki development, including:

• Mapping out the core code
• Creating extensions
• Modifying and Creating Custom Skins

This course is for intermediate-level LAMP developers and up, preferably with some styling experience.

The Structure and Purpose of MediaWiki

• Where we are now
• How it ended up this way
• Current efforts, and the future

The path router

• The startup and shutdown of MediaWiki

The Includes Directory

• 'Here be dragons': a map to the includes directory
• Walking through
• Marking out your points of interest

Essential files, classes, and methods

• Database
• The parser
• Image Handling
• The API
• The Job Queue
• Pages, articles, revisions, and titles
• Global functions

Extensions

• What you need to know
• A Game of Chess: Choosing your moves wisely
  • Hooks
    • The limitation of hooks
  • Object-oriented extension versus hooking
    • Dead ends, and how to avoid them
• When you have no other choice: modifying the core code

Special Pages

Troubleshooting

• Where did it go?
  • Tracing the path of an object
• What went wrong?
  • Debugging in MediaWiki
  • Finding the root of an error
  • Exceptions

Skins

• We're extensions too!
• Vector, and the current skinning efforts in MediaWiki
  • What is changing
• Creating a skin from scratch
  • The classes you must work with (or around)
  • Creating the raw skin
  • Theming, and CSS classes at your disposal
• JavaScript modules and page output

MediaWiki and the Database

• The schema

Contributing, Gerrit, and working with the team

This course has been created for people who are going to use MediaWiki software as editors, users and web site administrators.

This course explains how to:

• Find the information you are looking for on an existing site
• Create, edit and remove pages
• Design a structure of the page
• Analyse the best solution for the structure of the entire project
• Manage users
• Create and manage a community  

Some projects using MediaWiki:

	Wikipedia Free encyclopedia
	Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus
	Wikinews Free content news source
	Wikiversity Free learning tools
	Commons Shared media repository
	Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals
	Wikiquote Collection of quotations
	Wikisource Free source documents
	Wikispecies Directory of species

Setup

• Installation requirements and environment
• Basic initialization
• LocalSettings.php
• Extension installation requirements

Reading

• Navigation
• Searching
• Tracking changes
• Watchlist

Editing

• Editing pages
• Starting a new page
• Formatting
• Links

Advanced editing

• Images
• Tables
• Categories
• Managing files
• Moving (renaming) a page
• Redirects
• Deleting a page
• Protected pages

• Templates
• Variables

• Special pages
• External searches

• User pages
• Talk pages
• Signatures
• Subpages
• Namespaces

Wiki administration

• Sysops and permissions

The following features require extra permissions that are not normally granted to all wiki users.

• Protecting and unprotecting pages
• Sysop deleting and undeleting
• Patrolled edits
• Blocking users
• Range IP blocks
• Assigning permissions