Today I installed MediaWiki for the first time to keep track of the documentation behind my various projects. I was finding myself getting reset too many times because I would forget my previous assumptions and my various TextEdit documents were getting lost in an unorganized virtual pile on my desktop. This happens a lot as multiple clients have you switching between tasks.
Installing MediaWiki is theoretically and practically easy, but the first time still takes a few hours. I spent a good amount of time figuring out how to get pretty URLs which was complicated by the fact that my wiki was going to be at the local address http://wiki. Hint: Don’t name your internal wiki site wiki if you want the process of getting pretty URLs to go quickly. I renamed my wiki directory and site name to something else and proceeded successfully. Luckily, all of that while taking some time, went smoothly.
I have my wiki installed on an Apache virtual host, which the documentation writers don’t really think of as a common scenario. If you are going to do this and want pretty URLs, just realize you will have to know a little bit about .htaccess files. If it helps, here’s my .htaccess file I created as part of the process to get pretty URLs:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^wiki/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1 [PT,L,QSA]Overall I am happy with it, although in some ways I’m just mildly unhappy with it. I would prefer a web based administration page to manually editing the LocalSettings.php file. I would prefer that MediaWiki automatically create the appropriate .htaccess file for pretty URLs based on your installation. (Why would anyone not want pretty URLs?) On the other hand, the installation is pretty smooth and MediaWiki really keeps you focused on content because there isn’t much else to do but create content. This is a good thing.
Submit a Comment