On Nov 20, 2003, at 01:13, Steve Cooney wrote:
Ok --but would it be better for MediaWiki if it had some emphasis on its ability to branch out into different, customized applications? By this, I mean that, just as some have pointed out, MediaWiki aspires to be more than just Wikipedia, and as such, people will want use-specific packages, perhaps including cut-down lite wiki versions (but with the benefit of some newer bells and whistles). I know the whole thing is actually pretty tiny anyway, though.
We certainly do want to make the code more generalized and modular; even on the Wikimedia servers we're running other projects than just Wikipedia: Wiktionary, Wikibooks, etc have their own needs and it's in everyone's interest to keep the main code base easy to work with, easy to extend, and easy to upgrade without breaking custom changes.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)