These extensions all help make your job as the sysop easier.
Planning a vacation where you can't keep up with changes to your wiki? This extension helps prevent inactive wikis from becoming the targets of spambots and vandalism by automatically locking the wiki database if a sysop has not logged in during a time period defined by $wgAbsenteeLandlordMaxDays. With the database locked, no further changes can be made to the wiki. To unlock the wiki database, and the wiki itself, the sysop needs to simply log in to the wiki.
Installing this extension creates a special page named AbuseFilter where privileged users can set controls to the user activity on the wiki. These users can also define how the wiki reacts to certain behaviors.
This extension requires the AntiSpoof extension to be installed as well.
This extension is used to restrict access to specific pages based on a user's group. After installing this extension, you can control both the viewing and editing of a page. This extension also allows you to grant access to multiple user groups. You can also block access to read certain pages by group or individual users.
Users who have been forbidden to view a page cannot use the search feature to view protected pages.
This extension allows the administrator to create blacklists for page titles and usernames that they deem inappropriate.
This extension is meant for smaller wikis. What it does is collect URLs from a table named Manual: Externallinks_table and check each URL for a successful server response. Any links that have a failed response are reported to you on a special page named BrokenLinks. This report also tells you about the page on which this broken link appears.
Using this extension places a Google Analytics tracking code into each page on the wiki. To keep the statistics more honest, users with bot privileges and sysops are not counted in the statistics. You have the option of keeping logged in users out of the statistical counts as well.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Google_Analytics_Integration
If you are in charge of implementing a wiki for an organization with multiple users, you would normally have two options when it comes to creating users. First, you could let the users create their accounts individually. While this takes the workload off of you, and any other administrator, it is a given that some of your users will not follow your directions when it comes to creating appropriate user names, using strong passwords, or entering the correct e-mail address. The second option alleviates any issues with inappropriate registrations because it requires you and your fellow administrators, if you have any, to create each account yourself.
The ImportUsers extension gives you the best of both worlds. If you can get all of your users into a spreadsheet, or other file that can be saved as a CSV, then you can easily import the list right to the wiki's database through a special page called ImportUsers. Not only will this save you time, but you can be sure that the accounts will reflect exactly what you want.
We saw MaintenanceShell in action in Chapter 11. This extension gives the sysop access to the wiki's maintenance scripts if they don't have access to the command line of their web server.
For the beginner MediaWiki user, categories may seem a bit intimidating. This extension allows you to easily define what category you want an article to be a part of and even define new ones if needed.
ManageCategories extends the edit area of the page to include three new parts:
A menu box where you can choose from all current categories
A text field to assign the article to a new category
Checkboxes that represents the currently assigned categories (optional)
This extension can be a great help if you need to keep track of user activity on your wiki. StalkerLog creates a log of user logins and logouts. By default, anyone can view this log but by customizing the permissions, you can set it up so that only certain groups or users have access to the logs.
In Chapter 8 we saw UserLoginLog in action. This extension displays the IP address of users who logged in, or attempted to log in, and displays them on the special page Special:Logs.
Managing user rights in MediaWiki can be a bit of a chore. Granting extra permissions means you have to search for the user by name and then add the permissions. To make this job a bit easier, you can install the extension, UserRightsList. This extension creates a special page that lists all of the users registered with the wiki. With a simple checkbox, you can grant or revoke additional privileges to your users.
This extension also comes with a filtering system so you can search by group or username and even employ SQL wildcards.