Book Image

MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide

By : Jeff Orlof, Mizanur Rahman
Book Image

MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide

By: Jeff Orlof, Mizanur Rahman

Overview of this book

<p>MediaWiki is the free, open-source wiki engine software that powers Wikipedia and many of the other popular wikis across the Web. Written in PHP, it possesses many features that make it the engine of choice for large collaborative wikis: flexible markup, comprehensive user management, multimedia handling, and more. Whether you are creating a public wiki for open contributions, a private wiki for collaborating within your work team or group of friends, or even a wiki for personal use, this book will provide you with all the essential steps you require to achieve this.<br /><br />This book covers how to administer users, back up and restore content safely, migrate your installation to another server or database, and even make hacks to the code. From the installation process to customizing the pages, you will learn what it takes to run a well designed, secure MediaWiki site.<br /><br />Throughout the course of this book, you will see the many different ways that MediaWiki can be used on the Web. This book covers the open source MediaWiki wiki engine from installation and getting started through structuring your collaborative web site, advanced formatting, images, and multimedia to migrating your installation and creating new MediWiki templates. While you will be introduced to the many uses of a wiki, you will also be taken through step-by-step exercises that will help you master the many administrative tasks associated with running and securing your wiki. You will learn how to prevent unauthorized edits being made to content, how to prevent spam, how to back up and restore your wiki, how to configure its look and functionality to suit your needs, and much more.</p>
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
MediaWiki 1.1
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Planning for new content


Before we get started writing new content for our wiki, we need to think about a few things first. While we may be tempted to jump right in and start writing, for the greater good of our wiki we need to set a few ground rules for any content we create. In fact, this would make for a great page called Contributor Guidelines, don't you think?

  • Always search the site for a page before you begin to create it. As your wiki grows, and the community expands, it becomes more and more possible that someone else had the same idea for a page as you. Searching for this page allows you to see what, if any, similar pages already exist. If there is nothing that mirrors the page you are thinking of creating, then go right ahead. If the page you were thinking about does exist, then you have one of two options. First, you can edit the existing page by making it better or by adding to it. The other option is to create a new page with a different title that approaches the subject in...