Rob Church wrote: The page as quoted failed to note this, or at least was sufficiently subtle that I could not find anything relevant. I have therefore added a ridiculously garish box to this effect which I invite somebody to copy-edit and tone down. This reinforces my view that we should have some sort of mechanism like the parser-hook system for adding extension pages, so that the code can be written to a published interface and upgrade gracefully. HTH HAND -- Phil -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/downward-compatibility-of-Specialpage-tf3901853.html#… Sent from the Wikipedia Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

On 11/06/07, Michael Daly <michaeldaly(a)kayakwiki.org> wrote: I maintain a couple of extensions which are still backwards compatible with 1.6.x and that's required me to be ruthless, reverting incompatible changes, writing a lot of version-adaptive code while being as clean as possible about it, and in general sometimes sacrificing a potentially faster means of getting something done. Ultimately, I think, the current means of registering a special page is certainly extremely efficient, quite well thought-out (hell, Tim Starling worked out the specifics, so...) and I am confident that the basic interface for doing so will remain stable for several major versions to come. We have to balance backwards compatible code against taking advantage of significant opportunities to improve, and this is one of those cases where I argue in favour of the latter. To be fair to Tim, while ExtensionFunctions.php and extAddSpecialPage() did the job, it added another file, in a totally different location, which caused all manner of problems alone; sometimes, change has to happen. Rob Church