On 5 February 2012 10:24, Greg greg@gajennings.net wrote:
I have been messing with mediawiki 1.18 for a while now. I think what it needs is an administration page.
Why is there a reliance on manually editing LocalSettings.php and uploading it to the site? Why is there not an Admin page that edits this online?
I would love to implement this but it might just be out of my ability to do so.
It is so difficult to understand mediawiki settings and the mediawiki online-help is not very helpful.
What do you think?
There are several things to consider for such a tool. Several have been mentioned here, but besides useability (as in, with complex configurations beyond just setting values, which are not that uncommon), the second most important issue is security.
Many have probably noticed that when you finish the installer these days, it sents you a LocalSettings.php, that you download and then upload. Why? It used to write it to the configuration-directory in the olden days; what changed? Simple; security. Allowing the webserver to write in the configuration file can be considered dangerous and potentially a big security issue.
You can then imagine the issue one might take with the idea of allowing MediaWiki to manipulate and control the configuration file. That will certainly open up the can of worms that is the configuration writing security issue.
Because even *if* you could manage to craft a GUI tool that was so sophisticated, yet so simplistic that it was usable by even the least tech-savvy out there, then it would still be the fact that at least in *any* 1.18 installation, the LocalSettings.php file is *unwriteable* by the webserver. And as I gather, there is no intend in changing that, particularly considering all the work that went into making it unwriteable when it used to be.
And obviously when it was owned by the wrong user.
Also; as an aside; it may be worth considering whether making an Administration status page might be a good idea, where Sysops can verify through the software whether the installation is sane (such as the LocalSettings.php file having the correct user, etc.).