User blog:Ioyka/MediaWiki

I've been doing some digging around and I discovered a few things. Wikia is based off the open-source MediaWiki and MediaWiki is written in PHP. This explains all this similarities found between the page editor and HTML style markups. Incidentally the page editor also supports hardcoding in HTML tags.

Javascript on the other hand doesn't parse out. That choice was probably a security concern. All the Javascript code is done inside extensions which have to be installed; I.e. they can't written inside the pages.

While I'm on the subject, let's not forget MediaWiki has a language of its own: Wikitext and Magic Words. Wikitext determines how text appears on screen. Typing ==Page heading== will make page headings in the pages. Standard stuff there.

Magic words are something a bit more obscure. They can determine short expressions and return values. returns. Neat huh? Even more, it also supports behavior switches, variables, and parsing.

So what does this all mean? In order to make my dynamic pages:


 * 1) I have to find an extension that can toggle visibility of page objects or...
 * 2) Do more digging and pray Magic words has something.

Summary

 * Wikia is written in MediaWiki.
 * The page editor supports Wikitext, HTML, and magic words.
 * Internally Wikia supports Javascript and PHP.