David Patrick wrote:
As a proof of concept (these managers take a lot of convincing) I am trying to run an installation of WikiMedia on my localhost address.
Just a note: Wikimedia is a non-profit corporation which runs Wikipedia and other web sites. The software is MediaWiki.
I have Apache, PHP and MySQL running. These were obtained as a single package from www.firepages.com.au and installed onto my Win2K machine. Wikimedia is installed on top of that.
Anyway, on to the problem:
Logging in to Wikimedia as either a normal user, or as a sysadmin, I can click on 'edit' to make a change, but cannot get the 'save' button to function correctly. Pressing 'Save' displays the changes I have made with a warning telling me that this is a preview, and that I should save my changes.
Edit your php.ini and make sure the session.save_path is set to a directory that: a) exists b) is writable by the web server
This is very commonly misconfigured on Windows installations of PHP, and will cause any PHP program that relies on sessions to fail. For instance, in addition to the editing problem you probably can't maintain a login unless you also click the "Remember my password across sessions" checkbox.
Check also the other session parameters to make sure none are wildly incorrect. (One person had a problem because session.referer_check has been mistakenly set with an unrelated value, causing session data to be discarded on every hit.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)