On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
Of all the code I've seen, the Mediawiki code seems to be one of the most difficult code bases to make simple changes in. When I had to change the template of a mediawiki once, the easiest answer I found was to put a proxy server in front of it, drop out the original template and spit the body text into a new template. (That said, this was a system I already had on the shelf that worked wonders for all sorts of commercial crapware)
What do you mean by "change the template of a mediawiki"? Do you mean templates in the MediaWiki sense, as in pages that can be transcluded into other pages? Or do you mean the skin? Skin HTML can usually be changed by just grepping a relevant class or id and editing some raw HTML, or a pretty simple wrapper layer. It can't be changed without hacking the code, so it's certainly a lot harder than in most popular web apps, but I'm pretty sure you can do it more easily in almost all cases than by postprocessing the HTML output.