Help:Contents
From Servers4Linux
I made this site with the wiki engine named MediaWiki. I've never used MediaWiki before.
I'm going to try to use this help area to record all the little tweaks I do on this MediaWiki site. So it's my "notes to self" on how I tweaked the default load of MediaWiki. It's not really very helpful when it comes to the actual contents of the site.
Someday perhaps I'll make a wiki page here on how I loaded MediaWiki here. For now, read these notes.
I have a vague idea about how this site should be organized. MediaWiki has this idea of "namespaces" which appear to allow you to organize content. They seem a bit involved, if not scary. For now I chose not to use them (I'll stick with the "stock" namespaces for now).
I needed a logo. Here's how I added the logo.
I don't want random knuckle heads editing the site. I'm not sure I want anyone but me editing the site. This appears to be the ticket. I have to make all new users, and only users with accounts can post.
Yup. That works. So far I had been making all these changes as an anonymous user. That no longer works. Yay. Of course, not the problem is that I don't have a user to edit pages with. Oh wait, yes I do. I specified a wiki super user named 'WikiSysop' at wiki install time. I'll log in as him. (If you're seeing this it must have worked).
Okay, now I need to make a wiki user to do my posts with (someone other that the WikiSysop user). So log in as 'WikiSysop'. Go to 'Special Pages' link on the lower left. This will take you to Special:UserLogin. If you are godlike, you'll get an extra link that says "Create an account". Use that to make additional accounts.
Next thing to tackle is the "short url" issue. The MediaWiki instructions say to install this into <your document root>/w and then do some magic to make this appear as <your document root>/wiki. See the discussion here. These fixes are divided into "have root access" and "don't have root access". Hmm, since I don't have root access I'll try this one. Yes, that works.
This site is going to have pictures on it. Supposedly you can upload images using MediaWiki, and then use the images in pages. The (very helpful) documentation suggests ways to enable file uploads. Here's an in-depth write-up. Yes, that works.
I rehosted this from my temporary domain to servers4linux.com. These are the basic steps. Export the database, import the database, copy the wiki directory in its entirety, tweak the LocalSettings.php file. I did this. When I opened the wiki I got:
Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 208834 bytes) in /public_html/*/whatever/the/path/is
Googled around for that. Tried uncommenting stuff in LocalSettings.php, no help. Got lots of hits on MySql export/import character set conversion problems. Fiddled for hours with that, no help. Finally tried increasing the php memory limit in .htaccess like so. That magically worked! Yay! I don't know why I had this problem. Same ISP, hosts set up the same as far as I can tell, etc. This should have been easy. I spent hours on it.
Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.
