On 11/06/07, Christoph ch95@rz.uni-freiburg.de wrote:
Why is the special page template as described in [1] not compatible with Media Wiki VERsion 1.6.9 ? Using this Template under 1.6.9 the Specialpage can be listed under Special:Version, but it is not visible at "Special pages" and if called directly, the created Specialpage doesn't exist.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Writing_a_new_special_page
As of MediaWiki 1.7.0, we started requiring PHP 5, which includes class autoloading. This feature, combined with a few others, meant that a more efficient method could be introduced for initialising special pages and preparing them to be called; the special page class is autoloaded when needed, and the special page list is lazy-loaded.
Since we can't guarantee that users of MediaWiki 1.6.9 aren't using PHP 4 (and most *are*), we state that the new method requires 1.7.x or greater, because we can then be confident that the PHP features we're using will be available.
Rob Church