All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XX

[GethN7]

What does Lua give us that standard MediaWiki doesn't, other than "It's newer so a certain variety of programmer is drawn to it like a moth to a flame"?

Because it looks like we just might be going to be burned by it...

Lua is not the issue, the Variables extension, by itself, is. Lua allows us to save backend processing time by making the same call for a function a template needs instead of having to re-run it every time for a different page as would be the default, which makes overall page loads faster.

Lua in fact could make Variables work long term if we use this with it

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VariablesLua

Variables are valuable regardless because it allows our current templates to fish out only certain information for our templates on an as-needed basis, we just need to make sure it remains future-proofed.

I shall be looking into other potential solutions for this issue in the meantime and will leave updates with Brent, since he's the one who switched us over to using Lua (which is actually very useful for our needs and allows for far more customization than we'd have by default) based templates for works, tropes, and creator pages.

And thank you, Bob, for your vote of confidence.