My company wants to use MediaWiki for internal documentation. They would like to separate how projects are physically stored in the MediaWiki structure.
For example instead of all files being listed under the root structure, can I create a new project folder for each project and have files be placed in their respective projects?
Is this possible?
Thanks Chris McIntosh
On 19/05/05, Chris McIntosh cmcintosh@gmail.com wrote:
My company wants to use MediaWiki for internal documentation. They would like to separate how projects are physically stored in the MediaWiki structure.
For example instead of all files being listed under the root structure, can I create a new project folder for each project and have files be placed in their respective projects?
I'm not 100% sure what you're asking, but I suspect it betrays a crucial misunderstanding about the software - the content in a MediaWiki wiki is not stored in a file hierarchy, but in a MySQL database. So your references to "folders" and "root structure", unless I misunderstand your question, are somewhat wide of the mark.
That said, there are a number of ways you can achieve what I think you're aiming at here, namely run a series of separate projects which are neatly and cleanly separated structurally.
The simplest is to install multiple copies of MediaWiki, or at least multiple settings files pointing at different databases (or with different table-name prefixes within the same database). This isn't as daft as it sounds - it's what Wikimedia do with their several hundred Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, etc, and there are facilities such as "internal interwiki links" (shortcut links to another project, like [[Wikt:word]]) designed to make such systems easier to manage. The downside is that the databases are then *completely* separate, and things like user accounts are unique to a single project, unless you hack things around; there has been work lately on an "AuthPlugin" system, and I think there's a working version of login-via-LDAP now. Of course, this separateness is also an advantage, allowing you to control access to each project independently.
The second option is to use "custom namespaces" - in the same way "discussion" and "project" pages are separated on Wikipedia from "articles", you can semantically seperate an arbitrary number of sections within one wiki. It should be noted that these *don't* function as "sub-wikis" or anything like that - links aren't specific to a local "context", for instance, so a page called "Project A:Foo" can only ever be linked to as [[Project A:Foo]], even if the page the link is in is called "Project A:Bar". They can, however, be listed separately, searched separately, and even (by making CSS rules based on appropriate "ns-##" classes) styled distinctly. Since the namespace is stored specifically in the database, it would also be relatively easy to introduce different user restrictions for them - this is *not* a supported feature, but people are always talking about it, so *someone* may have an implementation by now (the "user & group rights" system in v1.5 - currently alpha - should make this simpler still).
For more information on any of the things I've just glossed over, try looking on http://meta.wikimedia.org/ (particularly the pages linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents) or searching the mailing list archives by adding "site:mail.wikimedia.org" to a Google (or similar) search.
Thanks for your reply the namespaces is what I am looking for.
Chris McIntosh On 5/19/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
On 19/05/05, Chris McIntosh cmcintosh@gmail.com wrote:
My company wants to use MediaWiki for internal documentation. They would like to separate how projects are physically stored in the MediaWiki structure.
For example instead of all files being listed under the root structure, can I create a new project folder for each project and have files be placed in their respective projects?
I'm not 100% sure what you're asking, but I suspect it betrays a crucial misunderstanding about the software - the content in a MediaWiki wiki is not stored in a file hierarchy, but in a MySQL database. So your references to "folders" and "root structure", unless I misunderstand your question, are somewhat wide of the mark.
That said, there are a number of ways you can achieve what I think you're aiming at here, namely run a series of separate projects which are neatly and cleanly separated structurally.
The simplest is to install multiple copies of MediaWiki, or at least multiple settings files pointing at different databases (or with different table-name prefixes within the same database). This isn't as daft as it sounds - it's what Wikimedia do with their several hundred Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, etc, and there are facilities such as "internal interwiki links" (shortcut links to another project, like [[Wikt:word]]) designed to make such systems easier to manage. The downside is that the databases are then *completely* separate, and things like user accounts are unique to a single project, unless you hack things around; there has been work lately on an "AuthPlugin" system, and I think there's a working version of login-via-LDAP now. Of course, this separateness is also an advantage, allowing you to control access to each project independently.
The second option is to use "custom namespaces" - in the same way "discussion" and "project" pages are separated on Wikipedia from "articles", you can semantically seperate an arbitrary number of sections within one wiki. It should be noted that these *don't* function as "sub-wikis" or anything like that - links aren't specific to a local "context", for instance, so a page called "Project A:Foo" can only ever be linked to as [[Project A:Foo]], even if the page the link is in is called "Project A:Bar". They can, however, be listed separately, searched separately, and even (by making CSS rules based on appropriate "ns-##" classes) styled distinctly. Since the namespace is stored specifically in the database, it would also be relatively easy to introduce different user restrictions for them - this is *not* a supported feature, but people are always talking about it, so *someone* may have an implementation by now (the "user & group rights" system in v1.5 - currently alpha - should make this simpler still).
For more information on any of the things I've just glossed over, try looking on http://meta.wikimedia.org/ (particularly the pages linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents) or searching the mailing list archives by adding "site:mail.wikimedia.org" to a Google (or similar) search.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP] _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
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