Book for designing your own MediaWiki-based site

MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide is a new book from Packt that is aimed at helping wiki developers install, manage, and customize their own MediaWiki-based website. Written by Jeff Orloff and Mizanur Rahman, this book is a friendly guide that uses a fun example to teach all of MediaWiki's key features.

MediaWiki is the free, open-source wiki engine software that powers Wikipedia and many of the other popular wikis across the Web. It is extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.

In the beginning of this book, users will learn about the installation of Mediawiki wiki engine on their server and then move through structuring of their collaborative website by learning advanced levels of formatting, managing images and multimedia, and creating new wiki templates. They will also be taught how to integrate multimedia files into their wiki and add extensions to expand its functionality.

Tutorial: Organizing wiki content using MediaWiki

In this article series by Jeff Orloff and Mizanur Rahman, authors of MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide , we will learn how to organize our content by creating namespaces that allow us to group pages with similar purposes together, and we learn how to use categories to group pages with similar content together. It also teaches us about redirecting, moving, and swapping pages around so that we can ensure when a visitor comes to our site, they find the information they are looking for because the page titles will match up with page's content. MediaWiki has many built-in features that will not only help us keep our content organized, but make it extremely easy to do this.

In this article, we will learn how to make use of these tools including:

  • How we can create Namespaces
  • How to create Categories
  • How to setup a Template for our users
  • Why we would redirect a page
  • How to move and swap a page

We have focused mainly on organizing content rather creating content in your wiki in this article. We assume you should have a few pages in your wiki. As our wiki grows in popularity, the amount of content it hosts will continue to grow so it is important to organize the content in your wiki so that our wiki looks better to our visitors and editing and reviewing content is much easier for our users. If we think of our wiki as a library, it is easy to see why we need to organize our wiki. After all, if you walk into a library with no system for organizing the books, movies, music, periodicals, and others you would find it hard to locate what you are looking for. Likewise, if we have no order in our wiki, then our visitors could find themselves frustrated when trying to find the information they are looking for. If they become too frustrated, they will go elsewhere.

Five IT books on my 2009 reading list

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Submitted by Bryan on

I seem to collect a number of books each year.  A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems.  Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library.  The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.

Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Windborn

Users loading Drupal for the first time usually have two surprises.  The first surprise is that Drupal's core lacks a rich text editor (no WYSIWYG).  Although you can use a RTE via a contributed module...it is still a surprise to most new users.  The second surprise is that the core also doesn't provide much support for images and other forms of multimedia.  This book will help the reader navigate through many of the contributed media modules available at Drupal.org and pick the right one for the right project.  I'm only half way through the book and finding myself trying out modules I likely would never have used without this book.

Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé

I haven't bought a new Python book since 2001 and felt it was time to try another.  I'm more of a dabbler than a programmer, but it is always good to have reference books like these nearby.  

Review of MediaWiki Skins Design

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Submitted by jude dsouza on

Jennifer Franklin Elrod: "I wish I had the book MediaWiki Skins Design
when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my philosophy
subsite. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Those were
the days when I didn’t have a baby. I could stay up half the night
going through hours of CSS trial and error just to tweak one or two
little design elements. I could never do that now. As soon as I have
time I intend to use some of the info in this book to clean up my
skins. Nothing like this existed to my knowledge when I set out to make
my skins. Documentation is often the weakest link in the open source
community. This book fills an important gap that should democratize MediaWiki even
more, making it more appealing to a wider swath of the web population."

To read more visit http://squirreltao.dreamfishery.com/2008...

MediaWiki plus FCKeditor: WYSIWYG for the wiki

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Submitted by Bryan on

A couple years ago we decided to use MediaWiki for a wiki implementation at work.  Wikipedia uses MediaWiki for their wiki application so we felt it was the right choice for our needs.  One concern my team had was that MediaWiki didn't come with a rich text editor (no WYSIWYG).

While a number of us may be fine with using wikitext or HTML to edit our wiki pages, I believe the majority in any organization prefers to edit their pages with a friendly user interface similar to that found on their word processor. At the time, we tried a number of solutions but found neither the suggested TinyMCE or FCKeditor implementation integrated that well with mediaWiki.   So for our project we settled with wikEd, an editor that still required users to work with wiki syntax but surprising a very good tool for most users.

During a lunch conversation last week with Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, I mentioned my frustrations with MediaWiki not having available a good WYSIWYG solution.  Deane suggested that I look at a more recent implementation of MediaWiki plus FCKeditor. This project is being supported by the developers of FCKeditor themselves.

New Software Troubleshooting Wiki

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Submitted by Anusonia on

TroubleshootingWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides on software troubleshooting. This site intends to help users eliminate the potential problems that might arise while working with various applications.

It is often difficult finding a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant, and free information on software troubleshooting at one central location. Launched initially with over 20 tutorials covering different Content Management Systems and other software, TroubleshootingWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive troubleshooting resource where users are able to add their own tips and tricks.

TroubleshootingWiki.org is part of an ongoing initiative at Packt to develop unique methods of contributing to the Open Source community. Notable other initiatives include the Wiki on Web Themes and Templates, www.ThemesWiki.org and the annual Open Source CMS Award that has a total prize package of $20,000, divided amongst winning projects. Packt also operates a unique Open Source Project Royalty Scheme, which sees them donate a percentage of their Open Source book sales directly to the projects they were written on. To date, they have donated over $100,000 to Open Source projects.

PHP-based CMS apps that changed the world

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Submitted by Bryan on

I know I'm a week behind about this, but I just came across the link via Gadgetopia:  Open-source PHP applications that changed the world.  The CMS related applications that were determined world changers are listed below.

When you split the list into three sections, you get the feeling that PHP-Nuke, ezPublish, and osCommerce have been around for a very long time.  More importantly, you begin to think that it is time for Gallery, Drupal, and MediaWiki to either be seen as mature applications or for those applications to finally grow up.

MediaWiki: Security and Bug fixer release

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Submitted by Bryan on

Updated versions of MediaWiki to address some security issues has been released for MediaWiki 1.11.1, 1.10.3, and 1.9.5.

This is a security and bugfix release of the Fall, Spring, and Winter 2007 snapshot releases of MediaWiki. A potential XSS injection vector affecting api.php only for Microsoft Internet Explorer users has been closed.

To work around the vulnerability without upgrading, you may disable the API if you don't need it:

~ $wgEnableAPI = false; 

Complete Story

Press Release: InstallationWiki.org Promises to ease the Software Installation Process

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August 2007

New Website Launched that Promises to ease the Software Installation Process

 

InstallationWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides to installing software. Launching on August 6, 2007, the website will largely be driven and populated by content supplied and edited by experts, and hopes to bridge the gap between software experts and software users.

 

Quality, relevant and free information on installing software is often difficult to find, especially when new versions and editions are being released on a regular basis. The aim of InstallationWiki.org is to provide people with a one-stop source of information for installing whichever piece of software they’re working with.

 

The Installation Wiki will provide myriad benefits for a variety of individuals; acting as a resource for software users, whilst supporting the software community through gaining exposure for their respective programs.

Collaboration Loop: The Death of Wikipedia?

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Submitted by Bryan on
I have been struggling to decide what I think about the Wikipedia/WikiScanner episode that played out last week.  Collaboration Loop had some thoughts of their own in the article, The Death of Wikipedia?
But with the release of Wikiscanner we now find that organizations are actively trolling Wikipedia to help themselves, or to hurt others.   We find that our level of trust in Wikipedia has been significantly impugned.  We find that the social computing model is suspect to abuse from those who aren’t playing by the rules.  In effect, our naïve view of the world of wikis is destroyed.
No doubt there are many organizations and individuals that attempted to edit their "own pages" about themselves to correct what they honestly thought were mistakes or untruths.  But even when all parties are open and honest, there will be conflict.

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