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 installedMySQL 5.1.37 installedDB user: root@localhostPHP's memory limit is 128MInstallation directory c:\xampp\htdocs\eurowikiScript 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:
In addition to the default namespaces created during initialinstallation, 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
When creating a new article (wiki page), how do I assign it toa 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.
How can I generate a list of all articles with links tocorresponding 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.
Is it possible to assign different and specific templates forall 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.
Does the software impose any restrictions upon creating one'sown 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.