Hello readers of this list :)

tl;dr MediaWiki's wfMsg*() functions were removed in MediaWiki 1.27.

Long version: Maybe someone has already seen the work on the wfMsg*() deprecation task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T70750 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T70750

A little bit of background: MediaWiki provides different functions to get a localised message string, the one you normally choose is wfMessage, which creates a Message object. However, there are other global functions (including wfMsg(), wfMsgForContent(), wfMsgHtml() and so on), too, which was deprecated in MediaWiki 1.18 (with deprecating notification in 1.21) in favour of wfMessage. Unfortunately, a lot of (maybe unmaintained) extensions still used the old deprecated functions to get a localised message.

After a huge amount of changes to these extensions (tracked in the linked task), we now hope, that all usages of these functions are replaced by it's modern wfMessage-counterpart, at least we did our best to find affected extensions :)

Now, the time has come, that the change to mediawiki/core, which removes the old deprecated functions[1], was merged. This notification is mostly for people, who still use these functions, if you're sure you don't, you can stop reading here :P

If you're a maintainer of an extension, please make sure, that you don't use these wfMsg*() functions anymore (if your extension is hosted in Wikimedia Gerrit, you probably mentioned a change named "Remove wfMsg* calls", so we already did the work for you. If not, please take some minutes to find out, how you can migrate to the new wfMessage function to keep compatibility with newer MediaWiki releases. If you want to replace your usage of wfMsg* functions your best friend (mostly) is the documentation page[2], which describes appropriate replacements with the actual message functions. However, it's possible, that your case of usage isn't mentioned there, and if so, you could first try to find a better approach using the Message object (returned by wfMessage()), which is documented on doc.wikimedia.org http://doc.wikimedia.org [3], or, if you really don't know, what to do, ask in #wikimedia-dev or on this mailing list :) I think you'll get help as soon as possible.

I hope this answers all questions, if not, feel free to answer this e-mail :)

Best, Florian

[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/262333 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/262333 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Messages_API#Help_ with_replacing_deprecated_wfMsg.2A_functions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Messages_API#Help_with_replacing_deprecated_wfMsg.2A_functions [3] https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/ html/classMessage.html# https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/html/classMessage.html