Hi, all,
I've been maintaining a small, personal Wiki site (using TWiki) for a couple of years now and would like to migrate my content over to MediaWiki. My primary problem right now is figuring out how to keep several unrelated topics on one site insulated from each other.
I've throroughly read the user guide's section on organization and still cannot find out how I can insulate my various topics from each other. Namespaces appear to be the beginning of what I'm looking for, as they help organize content. However, I want to be sure that if someone is using a page in one namespace and they create a new link that it will be created in the same namespace.
From what I've read in the documentation, this isn't possible. Unless I
enforce that all of my editors must qualify their links with their namespace's name--which is an unreasonable policy for my site--links to unqualified pages will create documents in the global namespace, right? Ideally, I wish that new, unqualified links in a page in a given namespace would create pages in that same namespace. My understanding is that this is not how things work today, though.
How can I have one content group grow in a manner that in no way interacts with another? (For those of you that know TWiki, they call this organization component a "web".) Do I have to duplicate the directory structure and make different SQL DBs for each?
Thanks! Scott
Drummonds, Scott B wrote:
Namespaces appear to be the beginning of what I'm looking for, as they help organize content. However, I want to be sure that if someone is using a page in one namespace and they create a new link that it will be created in the same namespace.
This isn't what namespaces in MediaWiki do; they are markers of functional distinctions, not separate universes. Create separate wikis, and use interwiki links when you want to link between them.
(For those of you that know TWiki, they call this organization component a "web".)
If TWiki does what you want, why switch? This is a serious question, not an accusation; I'm curious what your reasons are for wanting to migrate to MediaWiki.
Do I have to duplicate the directory structure and make different SQL DBs for each?
You do not actually need to duplicate the directory structure; LocalSettings.php could use different databases based on hostname, for instance. We run 150 or so Wikipedias from one directory.
To create separate wikis, you must create separate databases (or in 1.4+ a separate set of tables with a different prefix within the same database).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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