New subject: [Mediawiki-l] Category caching & "new messages" problems

25 Oct 2005

I am running MediaWiki 1.5beta4 on the Saint WAMP 3.3.4 and I have two
problems. It's possible that both problems have the same root cause. Any
help would be much appreciated!

Problem 1: Category caching

The first problem I have involves the server-side caching of categories
at the bottom of an article page. If I edit an article and give it a
brand-new category, then save the article, the category name is
displayed in red (because the category doesn't yet exist). This is what
I expect. So I click on the category name to bring up the edit page,
enter some text and save the category.

When I return to the original article the category name still appears in
red and still uses "action=edit". I want the category name to be blue
and to link to the article without editing it.

Additional information:
- If I control-refresh my browser the category still appears in red with
action=edit
- If a user who's never been to the article browses the article the
category still appears in red with action=edit
- If I view the article through a redirect the category appears in blue
- If I add new articles to the category, they appear in blue
- If I add action=purge, this fixes the problem --- but since the
problem occurs every time I create a category, this is not a solution!
- I have made some manual changes to LocalSettings.php and httpd.conf
(see below)

Problem 2: "New messages"

If a user leaves a message for another user on their talk page they get
a "new messages" banner. This banner never disappears.

I searched around on the web a while and found a solution: get the user
to watch and unwatch their talk page. Again, this solves the immediate
problem but isn't a permanent solution.

Customisation

I have made a few manual changes to my LocalSettings.php:

# Must be logged in to edit
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

# Must be a Sysop to create accounts
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

# Enables uploading of all file types
$wgStrictFileExtensions = false;
$wgCheckFileExtensions = false;
$wgEnableUploads = true;

# Short article paths
$wgArticlePath = "/w/$1";

# Timezone NZDT
$wgLocalTZoffset = 13;

And two changes to httpd.conf:

Alias /w /web/root/wiki/index.php
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so 

Thanks for your help,

Ben Arnold