I'm trying to put everything I have to offer on MediaWiki.org - please join me.

Here goes for today, Friday, May 18, 2007 (how long has this been going on? Since April 6, 2007, which was my first post here, and February 7, 2007 was when I "officially" started searching elsewhere for this very same help):

My Struggle #1: PROTOTYPE, building an intranet-sharable Wiki that does not require admin privileges on my local primary workstation. Cornelius Herzog's "Wiki on WOS" (Web server On a usb Stick) from http://www.chsoftware.net/ works. However, it requires that I permit each visitor access by a manually entered list of internal-IP address. This is arduous and requires that I be here for newbies to achieve their initial success. This dampens their enthusiasm to stay with the Wiki learning curve.

My struggle #2: ALPHA/BETA, building an in-house, intranet-sharable Wiki WITH admin privileges on my remote secondary workstation. I have yet to get ANY MediaWiki system working at all. I have yet to find a resource that clearly and concisely lists the *linking steps and confirmation checks* between Microsoft-Windows-XP-Pro, Apache, PHP, MySQL, and MediaWiki (and PHPMyAdmin).

(The book "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide: Install, manage, and customize your MediaWiki installation" by Mizanur Rahman, 2007 http://www.packtpub.com/ was no help. It says, page 19, "Since this book is about MediaWiki, we are not going to learn about the installation of a web server, database server, or even PHP." Well, all right, then! So much for fulfilling their own title! Thanks!)

My dream struggle #3: build MULTIPLE WIKIS on one computer that share the SAME DATABASE, and also, build MULTIPLE WIKIS on one computer that DO NOT SHARE THE SAME DATABASE.

If anyone has links to resources supporting *linking steps and confirmation checks* resolving these struggles, please share! I've read most of the ones in Google's top search results and find they are missing specific *linking steps and confirmation checks*, and are also usually out of date (MySQL 4 and PHP 4 and MediaWiki 1.3, for instance).

I envy anyone who has accomplished success, especially anyone who has more than one working MediaWiki in any format!

- Peter Blaise