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

Summary


In this chapter, we saw that there is more to running a MediaWiki site than writing good content. As our wiki grows and we add users, we will have to decide what we will allow our users to do on the wiki. We learned that through proper management of the user groups, we can take away privileges and provide users with extra privileges.

By default, MediaWiki is rather restrictive in what type of files it allows us to upload. However, to be a truly collaborative site, we may need to make changes that give our users a bit more of an option. We learned that we can control the type of files we allow our users to upload to our wiki if we have enough trust in our user base.

Finally, we approached the subject of security. We were able to install two extensions that will help keep our wiki more secure and we learned of some best practices we need to follow as an administrator.

In the next chapter, we are going to tackle how we can manage a multi-user environment. With the knowledge we gained so...