William van Zwanenberg wrote:
I am a completely newcomer to Mediawiki and have an
enquiry regarding
its installation and configuration. I hope therefore that subscribers
of this mailing list will make allowances for me if I have inadvertently
mailed the wrong list were my enquiry would be better directed at
another. If this is the case, I apologise and would ask that users
direct me to a more appropriate list that is more suitable.
No problem. Rest assured, this is the right mailing list.
The current windows based sandbox installation is as
follows:
- PHP 5.30 installed
- MySQL 5.1.37 installed
- DB user: root@localhost
- PHP's memory limit is 128M
- Installation directory c:\xampp\htdocs\eurowiki
- Script URI path: /eurowiki
You should have also included the mediawiki version, so we can yell at
you if it isn't the latest one :)
The questions I have concerning namespaces are as
follows. I apologise
if these questions seem somewhat elementary but as I said, I am a
complete newcomer to the software and I have only just started to get my
head round how it all works and have only just begun to read all the
information contained within the help section of the main mediwiki
website:
1. In addition to the default namespaces created during initial
installation, can I create namespaces of my own and if so, how do I do
so? I would like to create potentially another 5 unique namespaces
specific to my wiki installation. What I need to know therefore is (a)
if this is possible and if so (b) how to do so.
Of course it is possible. It is explained at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces
2. When creating a new article (wiki page), how
do I assign it to
a specific namespace? Is this achieved through nothing more complicated
than giving it a name in accordance with the names associated with one's
existing namespaces eg: 'Help: Editing an Article' - to create an
article regarding how to edit a given page within the "help" namespace?
Right. Just give it a name beginning with the namespace name + a colon.
3. How can I generate a list of all articles
with links to
corresponding article page contained within a given namespace and
display this in a "special" wiki page (article)?
Not sure what you want here. Does Special:WhatLinksHere fits your needs?
It can also be reached from the toolbox.
4. Is it possible to assign different and
specific templates for
all articles within a given namespace? For example, for purely aesthetic
reasons (and because I think it will make orientation of the wiki that
much easier for users), I'd like to change some of the graphics and
background of all article pages contained within the "help" and
"manual"
namespaces. They might have say a different logo and a blue background.
I wondered if this was possible without having to engage in a major PHP
programming hack and if so, how. I'm a reasonably competent PHP
programmer but I don't want to have to start making major changes to the
course code unless absolutely necessary.
Yes. Use CSS (edit MediaWiki:Common.css) and change the background color
for ns-X where X is the number of your namespace.
5. Does the software impose any restrictions
upon creating one's
own additional namespaces beyond those installed by default - e.g.
naming conventions, number and type of characters, etc, etc? if so, what
are these?
No. Simply give them numbers from 100 onwards and remember that
mediawiki treats even numbers as content namespaces and odd as their
talk namespaces.
In addition to answering these questions, I would be
grateful if
somebody could reply to this message by explaining in greater detail the
process of editing articles within the "mediawiki" namespace so that I
can go about changing the appearance of the master templates (and hence
the look and feel of the wiki as a whole) and so that I can go about
adding 3rd party extensions that will increase functionality.
They are edited just as any other page, but they are used by the
software for different functionalities. As it would be dangerous to
allow its editing to anyone, you need to be a wiki admin in order to
edit pages there.
At the moment, if I attempt to create a new article
(e.g.:
MediaWiki:Common.css in order to alter the general appearance of the
wiki), I get the following 403 page appear with the following wording:
"Access Forbidden - you don't have permission to access the requested
object"
Please can somebody explain what is going on here as I obvious want to
change start making changes. This same 403 appears regardless of
whatever article I try to create where in the process I'm assigning it
to a namespace.
That path seem to be handled by apache instead of the wiki.
What kind of url are you using? Looks like an error with your redirect
rules.
If when you do reply, you could bear in mind that
although I am above
averagely competent when it comes to IT issues, I am not a systems
engineer and I'm not an experienced programmer (and I have very little
idea how media wiki works) so I'd be really grateful if you replied in
as simple a language as possible as explained everything in detail. This
way I can learn from the experience.
Thank you.