Guild Wars Wiki:Requests for technical administration/ParserFunctions

Request for ParserFunctions

 * Home-page : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
 * Type : MediaWiki extension
 * Additional software requirements : None
 * Additional server-side maintenance requirements : None, besides the installation itself. See for instructions.
 * Reason for request : ParserFunctions are a near necessity for anything but the most trivial of templates. It adds such important features as conditionals, switch statements, and simple expression calculations, among others.
 * What else uses it : All Wikimedia projects&mdash;Wikipedia, for example&mdash;have it enabled, as does GuildWiki.


 * Possible pitfalls


 * It adds a (mostly negligible) operational cost to the first render of pages. However, the results are cached and the cost is no higher than any template call (less, in fact, as most ParserFunction operations don't have additional database costs). Note that the language is not Turing-complete (it has no loops), so the operational cost is finite.
 * It adds to the complexity of templates. This is a perennial battle about ease of use, but plenty of non-technical people find them easy to use, and the benefits are significant.