Mediawiki Installation

Installation of MediaWiki

Here we have the basic installation of MediaWiki outlined for you.

The default installation will create your wiki in subdirectory /mediawiki. Should you wish to have another name, e.g. http://www.yourserver.com/wiki, then you must make two changes.

Extra configuration

After installation of MediaWiki, your Wiki is available on every Virtual Host you run - unless you follow the instructions to place MediaWiki inside a Virtual Host.

An extra feature we added was support for iFrames by means of a little PHP script that we googled; the extension is called websiteFrame.php.

Furthermore, we changed the Creative Commons picture in the footer from a remote one to a local one.

For performance, the following tricks can be used (which we found on this site):

• apt-get install php-apc

  to install a PHP accelerator;
• add $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL; (instead of CACHE_NONE) into LocalSettings.php to enable that installed APC PHP accelerator;
• add $wgDisableCounters = true; into LocalSettings.php to disable the page counters.

On the example site referenced, the cache reduced rendering of an (almost empty) main page from 217ms to 50ms; disabling the page view counter took off another 10ms.

Extensions

One of the nice things about using something as popular as MediaWiki is the availability of a great number of extensions. One of the first things to do, therefor, is to install the default Debian Mediawiki Extensions package.

For user management, we added the extensions Password Reset and Group Permissions Manager.

A feature we needed to gain experience for another project was the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extension; it also has a pretty simple installation.

Multiple Wiki's on a single server

Some people want to run multiple Wiki instances on one single server - especially so if that server runs multiple websites (the forementioned Virtual Hosts). The answer to that is to create a Wikifarm.
Note that we've set up a separate site for this problem - you're welcome there with any questions you might have on wikifarms on Debian.