=Architecture==Two class hierarchies are used to provide the functionality associated with the different content models:*Content interface(and AbstractContent base class) define functionality that acts on the concrete content of a page, and *ContentHandler base class provides functionality specific to a content model, but not acting on concrete content. The most important function of ContentHandler is to act as a factory for the appropriate implementation of Content. These Content objects are to be used by MediaWiki everywhere, instead of passing page content around as text. All manipulation and analysis of page content must be done via the appropriate methods of the Content object. For each content model, a subclass of ContentHandler has to be registered with $wgContentHandlers. The ContentHandler object for a given content model can be obtained using ContentHandler::getForModelID($id). Also Title, WikiPage and Revision now have getContentHandler() methods for convenience. ContentHandler objects are singletons that provide functionality specific to the content type, but not directly acting on the content of some page. ContentHandler::makeEmptyContent() and ContentHandler::unserializeContent() can be used to create a Content object of the appropriate type. However, it is recommended to instead use WikiPage::getContent() resp. Revision::getContent() to get a page 's content as a Content object. These two methods should be the ONLY way in which page content is accessed. Another important function of ContentHandler objects is to define custom action handlers for a content model, see ContentHandler::getActionOverrides(). This is similar to what WikiPage::getActionOverrides() was already doing.==Serialization==With the ContentHandler facility, page content no longer has to be text based. Objects implementing the Content interface are used to represent and handle the content internally. For storage and data exchange, each content model supports at least one serialization format via ContentHandler::serializeContent($content). The list of supported formats for a given content model can be accessed using ContentHandler::getSupportedFormats(). Content serialization formats are identified using MIME type like strings. The following formats are built in:*text/x-wiki - wikitext *text/javascript - for js pages *text/css - for css pages *text/plain - for future use, e.g. with plain text messages. *text/html - for future use, e.g. with plain html messages. *application/vnd.php.serialized - for future use with the api and for extensions *application/json - for future use with the api, and for use by extensions *application/xml - for future use with the api, and for use by extensions In PHP, use the corresponding CONTENT_FORMAT_XXX constant. Note that when using the API to access page content, especially action=edit, action=parse and action=query &prop=revisions, the model and format of the content should always be handled explicitly. Without that information, interpretation of the provided content is not reliable. The same applies to XML dumps generated via maintenance/dumpBackup.php or Special:Export. Also note that the API will provide encapsulated, serialized content - so if the API was called with format=json, and contentformat is also json(or rather, application/json), the page content is represented as a string containing an escaped json structure. Extensions that use JSON to serialize some types of page content may provide specialized API modules that allow access to that content in a more natural form.==Compatibility==The ContentHandler facility is introduced in a way that should allow all existing code to keep functioning at least for pages that contain wikitext or other text based content. However, a number of functions and hooks have been deprecated in favor of new versions that are aware of the page 's content model, and will now generate warnings when used. Most importantly, the following functions have been deprecated:*Revisions::getText() and Revisions::getRawText() is deprecated in favor Revisions::getContent() *WikiPage::getText() is deprecated in favor WikiPage::getContent() Also, the old Article::getContent()(which returns text) is superceded by Article::getContentObject(). However, both methods should be avoided since they do not provide clean access to the page 's actual content. For instance, they may return a system message for non-existing pages. Use WikiPage::getContent() instead. Code that relies on a textual representation of the page content should eventually be rewritten. However, ContentHandler::getContentText() provides a stop-gap that can be used to get text for a page. Its behavior is controlled by $wgContentHandlerTextFallback it
1.8.16