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


We accomplished quite a bit in this chapter. The first part dealt with the users and how they can modify their profiles and change their editing preferences. By clicking on the my preferences tab, users are able to change the wiki's appearance by applying different skins or add pages to a watchlist so that any edits can be monitored.

In the second part of this chapter, we were introduced to how the administrators, or sysops, can view a page's history to view previous edits made to the page. If we see an edit that we don't agree with, we learned how we can revert the page to an earlier date to erase these edits. This works especially well should the wiki be a target of vandalism. Finally, we were taken through exercises that helped us build a stronger community for our users. By making use of talk pages, we saw how users are able to communicate directly with one another, or discuss edits and changes related to the page's content. To close out the chapter, we were taken through an exercise...