Hello,
I am trying to convince my company to use MediaWiki for our public knowledge base, and so far our test setup has been working well. However, I'm running into two major stumbling blocks, both of which seem to be inherent to how the Wiki works, and I'm hoping someone else has found solutions for them, or can at least help us do so.
1. Creating articles is someone unintuitive, since there is no "Create A New Article" page. So far everyone that's added articles has know how to construct the proper URL, but we want to streamline the process a bit. I'm pretty sure I can just write a new special page extension that does this automatically, but if anyone else has a similar and/or better solution, I'm all for it.
2. The bigger problem is with the search results. Our articles were added to the wiki with their title being the knowledge base number. However, we want the search results to show both this number, and a "title" (which is usually the question or error the article is about). Right now, when someone searches for articles they only see the few lines of context around the search word, and this is often not enough to differentiate between similar articles.
I have no problems writing code to make these things happen, and submitting it back to the community. (I've already cleared this with my employer.) But I also don't want to rush into mediawiki coding blind, and what I want to do seems beyond the scope of most tutorials. I've read up on creating extensions, and creating your own markup, but I suspect I will need to make big changes to the existing pages, possibly even the database schema, to achieve everything we need.
I'm hoping someone else has done something similar, and can either direct us where to find and install it, or at least point me in the right direction for writing it myself.
--Mike