MediaWiki

Chapter 11. Configuring MediaWiki: An Overview

Once you’ve installed MediaWiki, planned your wiki’s mission, and invited users, it’s time for the wiki to begin its life. And you’re in charge! This means you set the wiki’s appearance, choose its features, and generally keep things running smoothly for your user community.

As a wiki sysop or administrator (we’ll define the difference shortly), you have many tools at your disposal. In this chapter, we’ll survey the various kinds, including:

Advanced page constructs

Templates and Dynamic Page List, described in Chapter 7, now applied to running the wiki

Special pages

The built-in web applications we saw in Chapter 8, now applied to running the wiki

System messages

All the hard wired text in MediaWiki, found in menus, buttons, error messages, and other “system-supplied” areas

System-wide CSS

Changing cascading stylesheets for wiki pages

System-wide JavaScript

Changing client-side behavior for wiki pages

Configuration settings

Hundreds of global PHP variables for you to tweak via the file LocalSettings.php in the root of the MediaWiki source tree

Extensions

Custom programming to change MediaWiki’s behavior, available from third parties or created by you

Skinning

Changing the overall look and feel of MediaWiki

SQL programming

Directly accessing MediaWiki’s database

Maintenance scripts

A collection of PHP scripts supplied with MediaWiki for diverse purposes

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to configure and maintain a MediaWiki site. (Perhaps too many!) ...