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 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:

1. Automatic JavaScript file bundling and library consumption (HTML, Markdown)
2. Better minification for frontend sources (HTML, Markdown)
3. Fast and isolated JS unit tests (HTML, Markdown)
4. Conclusions