Brion,
Thank you for your help. I did in fact have $wgUseDatabaseMessage set to false, and I'm not sure why--but it has now been corrected, and editing MediaWiki:newpageletter now behaves as it should.
Harlan Landes
Brion Vibber wrote:
DrumCorpsWiki:newpageletter would not do anything, unless you've altered Language.php to change the name of the MediaWiki: namespace. (I highly recommend against doing that.) Nor should the site name have ever been "MediaWiki" -- if it somehow was set that way, this may have caused conflicts which broke the database entries. Check that the MediaWiki: entries in fact have cur_namespace set to 8.
If the message pages are in their correct place, changing a message in Language.php will normally have no effect. Have you set $wgUseDatabaseMessages = false ? This obviously will disable the use of the custom messages from the wiki.
Also, when testing changes please confirm that you're not just seeing cached pages with the old value.
Consider also upgrading your files to 1.3.1, as there are a number of bug fixes from 1.3.0.