Fun-with-mediawiki

From Ed's Mediawiki

MediaWiki is the software that runs Wikipedia and this wiki. It is basically a bunch of scripts written in PHP and a MySQL database. I expect there is more to the version used by Wikipedia than the one I am running on here.

What I use it for

This is just a convenient way for me to put stuff like this page on the web without doing HTML editing and uploads, navigation pages, etc. This Wiki is currently not intended to be a discussion mechanism, and because I have discovered some robot attacks, I currently do not allow anonymous users to create accounts. If you want an account on this Wiki, let me know and I can create it.

Reminders

  • To edit the sidebar, search for MediaWiki:sidebar and edit it logged in as Ejbadmin

Problem with MediaWiki not displaying pages

At some point, my wiki would display page titles, but the pages would be blank. But if I looked at the source of the page the wiki code was there. After some poking around, and having Midphase techs run a rebuild script to no avail, I found this page on the mediawiki site that indicates that an update to PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, a package used by the PHP code that implements MediaWiki) caused this and you have to either downgrade PCRE or upgrade mediawiki to version 1.22.1 or newer. Since 1.23.2 was available, I upgraded, and the problem was solved.

Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.31

This upgrade was very much overdue, and a request to MidPhase support resulted in the latest version available on Softaculous on cPanel, and it turned out to be easy. Though I did a lot of research on how to back up the wiki, when I went to do the upgrade, it turned out that Softaculous included an option to do a backup first. It turned out that the backup was not needed, and the upgrade went fine. It was necessary to edit LocalSettings.php in the wiki files directory as part of the upgrade, but this was not hard.

Want to make it responsive

I my effort overall to make my website responsive (playing nice on all size screens) I have been looking at ways to make the wiki responsive, there there are skins to make this happen. I will update this page with details after I do.