Praveen Prakash wrote:
Roan Kattouw wrote:
It's an extension bug, and the extension in question may not be maintained very well any more. I think EasyTimeline was written by Erik Zachte but is hardly maintained any more.
If so, why did such extensions add to mediawiki sites without proper testing? If it happened to Malayalam, it has problem with all Indic languages, Arabic, Chinese etc.
EasyTimeline is a really old extension. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was originally written before Unicode support was added to MediaWiki, or even before there was any support for languages other than English. So the problem isn't that EasyTimeline wasn't tested properly -- it's that it was tested against standards that were different from those we have today.
Yeah, someone should update it to have better multilanguage support. But if no active developers are familiar with the code, this may take some effort (patches welcome). Also, I seem to recall (several years ago, back when I last heard someone complain about this) that the big problem is not in EasyTimeline itself, but in the third-party software which it uses to render the images. Thus, MediaWiki developers might not be able to fix the problem on their own at all.