My First FAQ

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My Wiki FAQ

Why should I use MediaWiki?

Media Wiki is the easiest way I've ever seen of making a quick clickable links FAQ page

I tried that but it didn't work

I had a problem, I came to this page and it told me how to fix it. But it didn't work, the problem is still there!

Nine times out of ten this is because you didn't clear your cache. The simple test for this is to request a page that hasn't been requested before. Select the part of the URL in the address bar that contains the page title (e.g. Main_Page). Twiddle your fingers on the keyboard for a while, hit enter. Check if the problem is on that page too.

MediaWiki uses both a server-side cache and a client-side cache, so clearing your browser cache is often not enough. See the relevant entry below for more details.

Here are some other things to check:

• Were you editing the right file? Try inserting some garbage into the file you edited, does it break anything?
  • A great debugging tool in this case is to create a file called phpinfo.php, containing only <?php phpinfo() ?> . Upload it into your web directory and invoke it with your browser. Check the document root and the path to php.ini.
• Were you editing the right part of the file? Did you create a duplicate entry in php.ini? Add new settings to the end of LocalSettings.php (but before the ?>), not to the beginning.
• If you created a .htaccess, are you sure AllowOverrides is on? Ask your hosting provider.

If none of these things work, see the two entries below on how to get more help.

Where should I post my bug report/feature request?

Please post all bug reports and feature requests at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org. Please search through existing entries beforehand, to check that the problem isn't fixed in a newer release version of the software, and to ensure we don't have duplicate entries.

I have a question not answered in this FAQ. Where should I ask it?

You can either

1. Email the mediawiki-l mailing list, or
2. Ask in our IRC channel

Installation

See also:

• How do I set up interwiki links?
• How do I enable uploading files?
• How do I enable TeX (aka 'math support')?
• How do I make non-ugly URLs?
• How do I update from an earlier version?
• How do I change the name of the wiki?
• How do I require users log in to edit?

How do I install MediaWiki? What are the system requirements?

See Help:Installation

Is it possible to install more than one wiki (MediaWiki) on a server? How?

Yes, MediaWiki can be installed multiple times in different directories using either the same database with a different set of table prefixes (configurable upon install) or using different databases altogether.

Additionally, you may want to make some settings common for all the installations, and have a central place where changes to these can be made. Since the configuration file (LocalSettings.php) is executed as PHP code, this can be done with PHP's inclusion mechanism - for instance, by adding the line include_once("../CommonSettings.php") in each LocalSettings.php, and placing settings which apply to all wikis in ../CommonSettings.php.

If you have a large number of wikis on one host, you may not want to keep a separate copy of the source code for every one. Instead, extract the source somewhere, and for each wiki installation, symlink the entire MediaWiki directory with the sole exception of the LocalSettings.php file. This can be accomplished with the lndir command (available on some Linux installations) or an equivalent tool.

You can then either use a separate LocalSettings.php for each wiki, or (easier to maintain) determine the settings based on the URL. See also Wiki farm.

If you want your login to be persistent across Wiki's running on the same server, simply add the following line to your LocalSettings.php after $wgSiteName = ... :

ini_set("session.name", "{$wgSitename}Session" );

(Though you can expect some trouble if $wgSiteName contains spaces. In that case replace {$wgSiteName} with an explicit space-removed version). $wgSecretKey (or deprecated $wgProxyKey) must be the same across your wikis for persistent logins to work.

Have a look at Help:Wiki family

How do I install more than one Wiki-Server with SSL on Windows - MAR 2006 ?

• Installed Mar 2006, W2K3-Server, Apache 2.0.54, PHP5.04 (xampp-win32-1.4.14), MediaWiki 1.5.6

Solution : Shared VirtualHost with SSL, one IP-Address, one SSL-Certificate 

• 1. Install MediaWiki

e.g. 2 Wiki-Server, installed in real DocumentRoot, 
first in /DocumentRoot/wiki1 
second in /DocumentRoot/wiki2

• 2. Rename index.php and add entries (alias, ...) to httpd.conf

Rename index.php e.g. in wiki1ix.php and wiki2ix.php

# GLOBAL AREA httpd.conf
# First Wiki-Server 
Alias /wikisrv1 /DocumentRoot/wiki1/wiki1ix.php
Alias /wiki1ix.php /DocumentRoot/wiki1/wiki1ix.php
# Alias for upload-area
Alias /uploads /DocumentRoot/wiki1/uploads
# Second Wiki-Server 
Alias /wikisrv2 /DocumentRoot/wiki1/wiki2ix.php
Alias /wiki2ix.php /DocumentRoot/wiki2/wiki2ix.php
# Alias for upload-area
Alias /uploads /DocumentRoot/wiki2/uploads

# VIRTUALHOST AREA httpd.conf
<VirtualHost 111.111.111.111:80>
   ServerName www.domain.de
   ServerAdmin ...
   # Real DocumentRoot !
   DocumentRoot "/DocumentRoot"
   ErrorLog ...
   CustomLog ...
 ...
   # Wiki-Server 
   DirectoryIndex wiki1ix.php wiki2ix.php
 ...
   AccessFileName .htaccess
 ...
   ScriptAlias /php/ "/xampp/php/"
   Action application/x-httpd-php "/php/php.exe"
 ...    
</VirtualHost>

• 3. Settings in LocalSettings.php

$IP = "/DocumentRoot/wiki1";
...
$wgScriptPath       = "/wiki1";
$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/wiki1ix.php";
...
$wgArticlePath = "/wikisrv1/$1";
(wiki2 too)

• 4. Settings in .htaccess /DocumentRoot/wiki1

# RewriteRule SSL
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ /wiki1ix.php
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443$
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://www.domain.de/$1 [R=301,L]
(wiki2 too)

• 5. Optional Settings in .htaccess /DocumentRoot

# deny access to Root Directory, rewrite to another virtual host 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.de/othervhost/

# if Alias-Directory upload is indexed, rewrite home-link back to wiki-server
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} https://www.domain.de/uploads/
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://www.domain.de/wikisrv1/InformationDirectoryPage