Thanks everyone for sharing thoughts here and on the talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Best_practices_for_extensions>.
A number of clarifications have been made, and some unready/outdated sections have for the
time being been removed, shortened or replaced with a non-nominal reference to a different
page (such as Accessibility).
To the best of my knowledge, the remaining points of this best practices guide are now
reflective of the practices that most MediaWiki extension maintainers have been practicing
in recent years (both in WMF-deployed extensions and many third-party extensions alike).
As such, I've marked it as a developer guideline.
There are open discussion topics on the talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Best_practices_for_extensions> about more
practices to add, including a topic about Accessibility guidelines
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wqvqvhgsvpu1je15> (Do we re-incorporate some
of it? And how? How much do we duplicate? If not, what should we do instead?)
-- Timo
On Thu, 27 Jan 2022, at 04:43, Krinkle wrote:
Hi all,
You may be familiar with the Best practices for extensions
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_extensions> page on
mediawiki.org. It has been marked as a draft since 2017.
I'd like to polish this page and get it to a state where it would be uncontroversial
to label it as "Development guideline
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_guidelines>". This would not make
it a hard policy. Neither does it imply that it covers all practices in all situations.
Rather, it would mean that the items that are there now are indeed a part of our current
best practices. We would keep it alive through bold
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold> edits and talk page conversations,
similar to our Coding conventions
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Coding_conventions/PHP> and other such
guidelines that we maintain peer to peer and through consensus.
The reason I've not simply labelled it as such already is because before today I
found the document to be out of sync with our actual practices. I have made a number of
changes with descriptive edit summaries to bring it in sync with what I percieve to be our
best practices; based on how myself and other maintainers perform code review at large,
and how we review new extensions prior to deployment.
All are welcome to fix mistakes, raise questions/concerns on the talk page, on this
thread. You're also welcome to message me directly anytime if you prefer.