Editing MediaWiki Development Services (section)

=== Phase 3: Extension Integration ===

Extension selection and integration is one of the most technically consequential phases of a MediaWiki deployment. A professional integration process includes:

* Reviewing extension maintenance status on MediaWiki.org (stable vs. experimental vs. unmaintained)
* Testing in a staging environment before production deployment
* Configuring extension-specific settings in <code>LocalSettings.php</code>
* Establishing an update schedule that keeps extensions in sync with core version upgrades

Commonly integrated extensions for business and institutional wikis include:

* '''VisualEditor''' — a rich-text, WYSIWYG editing interface built on the Parsoid rendering pipeline.
* '''Cite''' — footnote and reference management for citations and bibliographies.
* '''CategoryTree''' — hierarchical category browsing through an AJAX-powered tree widget.
* '''Echo''' — a notification system delivering alerts for page changes, mentions, and system events.
* '''OAuth''' — integration with external authentication providers.
* '''Scribunto''' — Lua scripting support for complex template logic.
* '''CirrusSearch + Elasticsearch''' — full-text search with relevance ranking and faceted filtering.
* '''Semantic MediaWiki (SMW)''' — structured properties, typed links, and SPARQL-like queries via <code>#ask</code>.
* '''PageForms''' — form-based page creation and editing, typically used alongside SMW.