Thread:Project:Support desk/Perhaps someone here can help me figure out how best to do something for my game on mediawiki..../reply (3)

Well best way to learn something (in my opinion, but different people learn differently) is to look at how others have done something. Most extensions listed on this wiki are open source and you can look directly at their code (In particular, the one's used by Wikimedia tend to have higher quality code than other MediaWiki extensions).

How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker contains lots of resources for where to begin. http://openhatch.org/ also has some resources if you're new to contributing to the open source world

What I would start with is installing MediaWiki (sounds like you've already done that), and install some simple extension. Then try to change the extension to do something else (start with small minor changes). For example extension:CharInsert is a fairly small and self contained extension, try first figuring out what different functions called do (the php manual and MW doxygen (expand the "Class list" icon in the sidebar to get to the useful docs there) can be useful for that). Once you've got a general idea, try making minor changes and see how your minor changes affect the output of the extension.

For questions specific to mediawiki programming, this forum right here, as well as the #mediawiki irc channel on freenode (probably the best channel if someone useful happens to be online when you are), and the mediawiki-l mailing list, are places you can ask questions. (General programming questions are less likely to be answered in those places however). I'm not sure what the appropriate introductory help to php channels/mailing lists/forums are, but its a popular language, there are probably many that can be found with google.