Extension:Popups (Page Previews) front-end tooling

Intro

Extension:Popups is a MediaWiki extension that shows previews when hovering a link in a popup.

Extra requirements and a desire to find better ways to code for the frontend stack led to a series of interesting decisions in terms of tooling and features that we think could benefit other projects in the MediaWiki ecosystem.

In this series of posts we will explain the different technical decisions and choices in technology and tooling for the front-end part of the extension. We will provide reasoning, explanations, pros and cons, and our conclusions.

Table of contents:

== Conclusions ==

These changes and workflows have empowered the team to evolve and work effectively on the project, and we think they could benefit other projects that are heavy on client side UIs. Despite a few rough corners, and conversations to be had to streamline this kind of tooling into our ecosystem, we believe it is a win.

We are very happy to discuss, evolve the current setup, and help other teams or projects adopt the same kind of tooling. We would love creating opportunities for shared unified tools around these workflows for the ecosystem.

Please reach out in the comments, in phab tasks, or by email to reading-web-team@wikimedia.org.