Help:Administrator's Guide

This is PART 2 : Administrator's Guide - Installation, Configuration, Administration, Care & Feeding of the MediaWiki Documentation.

In this section, you will learn how to install, configure, administer, and troubleshoot the MediaWiki software.

Do you need MediaWiki?

What is MediaWiki?

Before installing the MediaWiki software package, ask yourself a few questions; this will determine which of the following help chapters are relevant for your needs.

• What is your experience with the operating system under which MediaWiki will be installed?
• Are you familiar with the technologies required to set it up? (see System Requirements)
  • If you are familiar with both, you may go directly to the chapter on Installation, and then onwards to the Configuration information.

• For what purpose do you need the MediaWiki software?
  • Creating a new Wikipedia (-> full instructions, importing),
  • Creating a mirror for an existing Wikipedia (-> database dump),
  • Creating another WikiMedia project (-> full instructions),
  • Creating a local Wikipedia site for personal use (-> database dump, mirroring)

Installation

Detailed information can be found here: Installation.

Configuration

Edit LocalSettings.php, mediawiki's system options.

To learn variables and about enabling the Apache httpd's Rewrite Engine, see Configuration

Configuration chapters (technically worded informative papers)

1. Preventing access
2. Configuration - interwiki/external wiki linking, adminsettings.php, language.php and localsettings.php features to edit
3. Configuration settings index - full list of localsettings.php variables
4. Apache config
5. Robots.txt - how to stop search engines from indexing the internals of your wiki
6. Short URL - Rewrite rules to make URLs shorter
7. PHP config
8. MySQL config

Administration

See Administration

Customization - learn how to use mediawiki and change settings here

1. Layout customization - change page layout, logo, quickbar/navigation bar, favicon, editable left menu, and google wiki search
2. Help:System message How to customize system messages such as link text, button text, etc. within MediaWiki without modifying any .php files.
3. Set Global Timezone
4. Localisation - localization and customization for link texts and messages like 'fromwikipedia'
5. Interwiki links
6. Custom skins
7. Custom namespaces
8. Configuration tips and tricks
9. Extensions

Security

See Security.