Mediawiki

Overview

Mediawiki is a wiki software to enable communities to write documents collaboratively [1]. Mediawiki, written in PHP, is what powers Wikipedia and also UABgrid documentation. The markup for Mediawiki is similar to other open-source wiki software like Trac, ie., it has WYSIWIG editing capabilities to translate formatting instructions to corresponding HTML tags.

End Users

For end users interested in using Mediawiki for document collaboration send an email to...

Coming soon, a self servicing web interface for provisioning a mediawiki instance (TBD, a landing page...)

Developers

For developers interested in customizing Mediawiki (themes, plugins etc), an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack is required. Recommended here, is one easy way to set up an AMP stack which has cross-platform capability ie., XAMPP developed by Apache Friends.

Mac OS X

XAMPP

1. Install and configure XAMPP for Mac.

NOTE: Mediawiki requires atleast PHP version of 5.3.2 or later. PHP - 5.3.1 version is incompatible with Mediawiki and this is the version which comes with the current stable releases of XAMPP.

So, for Mediawiki development, use XAMPP beta.

2. Start up xampp as root, either from xampp's control or from command line. This starts both Apache and mysql services.

$ sudo /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp start

Database

1. Set up a database for mediawiki using xampp's phpmyadmin console. Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to open up phpmyadmin console

2. Create a database with name wikidb

3. Click on the wikidb in the list of databases to the left. You should see a set of tabs for this database appear in the right frame.

4. Click on the Privileges tab and click on Add a new User

5. Mention the following details

User name: wikiuser
Host: localhost
Password: <type in a password>
Re-type: <re-type the above password>

6. Click on Check All in the Global Privileges section in the same page and then click Go

Download Mediawiki

Download mediawiki, extract to ~/Sites and create a symbolic link

$ wget http://noc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-1.16.0.tar.gz

$ tar -xf mediawiki-1.16.0.tar.gz ~/Sites

$ cd ~/Sites

$ ln -s mediawiki-1.16.0 mediawiki

Run Mediawiki installer

The following steps are a concise form of the detailed steps mentioned in the mediawiki installation guide for mac os x.

1. Browse to http://localhost/~short-username/mediawiki.