In Detail

Run your own MediaWiki collaborative website with this fast-paced, friendly tutorial, which is full of information and advice for creating powerful MediaWiki sites, and filling them with varied and useful collaborative content. Whether you are creating a public wiki for completely 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 show you all the essential steps. You will see the various ways of organizing and managing content, and preventing collaboration from getting out of control. You'll learn how to incorporate images and other media into your pages, as well as becoming a wiki markup wizard to produce intricately formatted pages with tables, lists, and more. On the technical side, the 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.

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.

What you will learn from this book

• Installing MediaWiki and getting started quickly
• Using special pages and domains
• Running multiple wikis from a single installation
• Incorporating images, multimedia, and advanced formatting
• Structuring your wiki from the start for easy navigation as it grows
• Managing users and protecting pages from vandalism
• Creating new MediaWiki templates

Approach

The power that makes MediaWiki so popular also makes it daunting for many would-be administrators. This book puts MediaWiki in the hands of busy administrators with no time for trial and error, enabling them to get their site up and running quickly and easily. A fun example that runs through the book holds everything together as you see how a real site develops and improves as more and more features of MediaWiki are used.

Who this book is written for

This book is for competent computer users who want to run MediaWiki. They should have some knowledge of HTML and have used a wiki before. No PHP knowledge is required for most of the book, although some chapters at the end include some PHP code.