MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up 2009/Notes/Backend


 * Day/Time: Friday 4 to 6
 * Topic: Backend
 * Session leader: Tim Starling
 * Participants: Emil, Mikael, David, Domas, Mark, DaB, Haiko, Stu

Notes:
 * Parser
 * Potential reusers, e.g. PediaPress, want to know how to split the MW parser from MW, and to do fun things with it like template annotation and suppression.
 * Legacy markup issues exist, e.g. interaction between preprocessor and main pass
 * Templates are ugly and slow, Lua would be nice
 * Documentation
 * The usual bug #1 complaints
 * A made-for-purpose translation interface similar to translatewiki.net would be nice. Manuals need to be translated.
 * Performance
 * Extension startup is slow, especially when you have 100 extensions
 * Message cache overhall: loading i18n messages is extremely slow, and can be improved by many orders of magnitude with efficient coding.
 * Static files (CSS/JS) need to be compressed for HTTP transport
 * Some bugs and sysadmin issues when using multiple database servers