TLDR: Tech leads please review Best practices for extensions
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_extensions> on
mediawiki.org.
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.
If you consider yourself familiar with our practices and/or lead and mentor other
engineers, please take a minute to review the page and consider whether the items reflect
your current understanding and judgement.
--
Timo Tijhof,
Principal Engineer,
Wikimedia Performance Team.