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.