* Platonides Platonides@gmail.com [Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:14:32 +0200]:
MediaWiki is largely backwards compatible. An extension designed for 1.15 is very likely to still work in trunk version (even though it may not get advantage of ResourceLoader, for instance). There are some core changes that affect extensions, but in such cases
we
usually update the extensions, too. Just download it from the
appropiate
branch.
Speaking of server-side (php interface), yes, MediaWiki is largely backwards compatible (except for static call Linker::link() and few ancient things, like wfLoadExtensionMessages‎() and so on). Speaking of client-side (Javascript), it is not so simple. Since 1.17, I am experiencing weirdness with client-side scripts in non-ResourceLoader ready extensions. For example my own Extension:QPoll had minor glitches until I've ported it to ResourceLoader. I guess that is because the scripts are now loaded at bottom, not at the top, or maybe due to jQuery introducing it's own scopes, while old scripts were assuming to have run in window scope. However, QPoll has very little tiny client-side script, while Extension:CategoryBrowser also have glitches and scripts are much larger - I still don't have the time to port it. In contrary to claims that Extension:FCKeditor works fine in 1.17, I've experienced opposite with my own Vector-based skin, not Monobook skin. Of course, I might try again, however I really disliked the way the extension is coded - with assumption that Monobook skin is being used, unreliable tricks with Parser and so on. Dmitriy