Extension

An extension lets you customize how MediaWiki looks and works. While some extensions are maintained by MediaWiki developers, others were written by third-party developers. As a result, many have bugs, and they are not all guaranteed to be compatible with each other. Some are unmaintained; not all extensions work on all versions of MediaWiki. Use any extension, especially those tagged as insecure, at your own risk. If you are using an extension that requires patches to the core software, be sure to back up your database. This helps avoid the risk of breaking your wiki.

Types of extensions

 * Parser tags extend the built-in wiki markup with additional capabilities, whether simple string processing or full-blown information retrieval.
 * Parser functions are special wiki markup syntax that can 'interact' with other wiki elements in the page, and give a specific output.
 * Hooks allow custom code to be executed when some defined event (such as saving a page or a user logging in) occurs.
 * Special pages are pages that are created by the software on demand to perform a specific function.
 * Skins allow users to customize the look and feel of MediaWiki.
 * Magic words are a technique for mapping a variety of wiki text strings to a single ID that is associated with a function.
 * MediaWiki provides an action API, a web service that allows access to some wiki-features like authentication, page operations, and search.
 * The ContentHandler introduced in MediaWiki 1.21 makes it possible for wiki pages to be composed of data other than wikitext, such as JSON or Markdown.
 * MediaWiki provides SessionManager and AuthManager, two authentication-related frameworks to enhance security via custom authentication mechanisms.