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

Using tables


When it comes to building websites, developers have come to think of tables as a bad word. Instead of using tables to layout a web page, most developers opt for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define positions and the layout of a page.

When we talk about tables as they pertain to our wiki, we are not talking about the layout of the site. Instead, we are using tables only to organize and display content to our viewers. In this instance, the use of tables is encouraged.

Table syntax

To create a table in MediaWiki, we need to use curly braces and a vertical line like {| |}. {| is used to open the table and |} to close the table. All the content will be between these two tags. This is also known as wiki-pipe syntax.

Note

Note: Both opening and closing table syntax must reside on a separate line. No other tags, apart from attributes of the tables, may exist in those two lines or else the table will not be rendered properly.

There are some important rules we need to follow in regards...