Well it does have a certain coolness factor to do everything through the wiki. It's kind of like how Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebookers to be able to do everything they needed to do on the web without leaving Facebook. Facebook would have email, messaging, games, video, search, and even Wikipedia articles! https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/03/25/facebook-has-officially-declared-i...
But why should Zuck be the only one to have such grand, sweeping ambitions? Once MediaWiki becomes powerful enough, it can kill all other apps and rule the world! http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/04/13/ 474011009/facebooks-new-master-plan-kill-other-apps We can create MediaWiki extensions for artificial intelligence, virtual reality, drones, you name it. Why shouldn't there be artificially intelligent robotic aircraft that anyone can edit? https://www.fastcompany.com/3052885/mark-zuckerberg-facebook
Facebook walls people off from each other through the proprietary nature of its technology and the cliquish tendencies of its circles of friends. MediaWiki brings everyone together through openness and its natural tendency to foster online collectivist utopias. Therefore the time is coming for a steel cage match between the two platforms, in which they battle for dominance, with room for only one survivor. Once technology advances to the point where the software becomes self-aware, this deathmatch can move from being a theoretical possibility to a practical reality.
One might ask, "Why is it even necessary to revise LocalSettings.php so often?" Ideally, there would be a configuration database, so that it wouldn't be necessary to make so many changes to LocalSettings.php, but I think the reason that never caught on is that there just aren't enough MediaWiki installations out there for it to seem like a worthwhile idea. It's not like WordPress, which probably has millions of installations. Or hundreds of thousands, anyway. Thus, it seems like we're doomed to continue manually editing PHP files for the foreseeable future.
Sucks that they got rid of php_check_syntax(). That seems superior to php -l. http://php.net/manual/en/function.php-check-syntax.php
On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 7:32 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Most people just use a git repo for version controlling their LocalSettings.php
If you really really want to do this onwiki approach, try verifying the file with `php -l` before saving.
-- brian
On Saturday, July 1, 2017, Jean Valjean jeanvaljean2718@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah, that's already happened a few times (typo taking the site down).
What
I did on another wiki farm was have one wiki in charge of the other
wiki's
config files, so that if you messed up LocalSettings.php, it wouldn't
take
down the wiki that was modifying it.
My goal was to have some sort of version control system in place so that
as
different people are changing the files, we know who did what when, and
can
revert easily to a previous version.
On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 7:04 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Even ignoring the security issues, if one of your users makes a typo,
they
take down the site and they cannot revert because the site is then down.
From a security prespective, this is equivalent to giving your users
shell
access to your server. They can run any arbitrary program, do anything, insert backdoors, etc. Additionally this setup requires the web user to have write access to php enabled web directories which is also bad practise.
-- bawolff
On Saturday, July 1, 2017, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/01/2017 03:16 PM, Jean Valjean wrote:
I want to let some of my administrators (in the wizards group) edit LocalSettings.php, so I used this snippet, which allows them to make changes by editing the Project:Shared_config.php page. Then I
protected
the
page so that only wizards can edit it. Do you think this presents any security issues?
Yes, it presents a huge security issue. Anyone who can modify your LocalSettings.php can execute arbitrary PHP code. They could see any private data in your database, easily get passwords, or even
potentially
give themselves server access.
I would highly recommend NOT doing this.
-- Legoktm
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