2014-02-25

Level Up - Webmaster: How To Get Started With MediaWiki

Want to create your own wiki pages like Wikipedia? You can organize all your thoughts, add notes for your new book you want to write, and more. The wiki can be either public, private, or half and half. You decide.

Going through this process will allow you to edit any and all features that are provided with MediaWiki, the wiki engine for Wikipedia and many other wiki sites.


Step 1. Download MediaWiki, it might be as a .tar.gz file, which in that use 7-Zip to unzip the compressed file, you may have to use 7-Zip twice to fully open it and see the source files.

Step 2. Copy all the files to a directly on your domain.com/mediawiki/w/ directory. One of the easiest ways is using FileZilla, navigating to the public directory using the GUI, then click+drag all the files into the directory. Note: The reason I said that particular directory is because it will allow you to do a lot more later on, like setup the domain.com/wiki site to serve the pages in your wiki. As you wait for all your files to upload to your server,

Step 3. Create a new database and user for that database. This is the method that the MediaWiki instance will be using to save and retrieve all the information for your wiki.

Step 4. Wait until all the files have finished uploading to your domain.com/mediawiki/w/ directory, then navigate to that page in a browser. It'll say LocalSettings.php file not found, so this is where you will use a wizard to setup all the properties of your site, like public/private and more. Each of these properties can always be changed later. I recommend reading through all of them to understand better what is available to you.

Step 5. After going through the entire wiki, the wizard will prompt you to download the LocalSettings.php file which you can then add to the same folder that you previously installed all the files in.

Step 6. In a browser, navigate to your domain.com/mediawiki/w/ and see that you have your main default page show. Congrats, you now have an instance of MediaWiki running on your own server.


If you run into any problems during this process, you can click on the little question marks in the wizard to pop up more information of a section or input area. Another great source of information is on the official install page.


~ Danial Goodwin ~



No comments: