MediaWiki is probably not only one of the most popular wiki software today, but also powers Wikipedia, one of the biggest sites today. MediaWiki, like WordPress is a simple PHP application. Well, maybe not on the inside, but the complexity is nicely hidden away from the web server. By the way, Wikipedia uses Lighttpd to power its upload page.

First, download the MediaWiki distribution from the Wikimedia site at http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki. The latest version at the time of writing is 1.13.0. As MediaWiki relies on PHP, it will run on almost any system that has a fairly recent PHP installed. Unpack the file to a directory, which we will use as the document-root. For our example, it will be /web/mediawiki. Make sure this folder is accessible to our PHP process—when in doubt, just run chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /web/mediawiki (or whichever user:group combination our PHP process runs with).

For our example, we will assume that our PHP interpreter has FastCGI support; if not...