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Monahon, Peter B. wrote:

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Brion wrote: ... The strings in MediaWiki:Sidebar ARE NOT TEXT STRINGS, they are MESSAGE KEY NAMES. You should list something like: ourwiki-url|ourwiki-text then in MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url you put: http://our-wiki-url/mediawiki/index.php? title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&namespace=1 and in MediaWiki:Ourwiki-text you put: Discussion/talk index This keeps things clean and localizable.

Peter Blaise responds: Uh ... thanks, Brion ... but ... by what method would I "put", as in: "put http://our-wiki-url/mediawiki/index.php? title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&namespace=1 into MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url"?

1) Go to the page "MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url" on your wiki.

There are several ways to go to a page on your wiki.

One is to type the name directly into the URL bar in your browser, in the part of your wiki's URL where the page title appears. (Sometimes when the name contains special characters, like "?" or "&" this doesn't work properly unless you know the URL encoding techniques, but don't worry about that.

Another is to type it into the "Search" box in the sidebar and click the "Go" button. If the page doesn't exist, usually you will be offered a link to create the page at this point, and you can just click it.

A third would be to add a link on an existing page by editing it and typing a link, like [[MediaWiki:Ourwiki-url]]. Then you could click on the link. (This might be a good idea if you're keeping a page of notes about your configuration.)

2) Click the "edit" link to go into edit mode.

This might not be necessary if you followed an edit link using the "search" or "create a link on another page" methods above.

Note that all 'MediaWiki:' pages are restricted, because they are a special type of page which is used by the software. So you need to be logged in as a sysop account in order to edit them.

If you are working with MediaWiki:Sidebar then you should already have that part down; it has the same restriction as any new page you would be adding.

3) Put stuff in.

Typing usually works. ;)

Also you might do cut-and-paste if you already have the link somewhere else.

Do you mean "edit messages.inc" ... and any other configuration master files?

You should never edit the Messages*.php files unless you are very sure what you are doing.

In most circumstance you need do this only if you are modifying and maintaining the core software distribution. As a maintainer of a particular wiki on a particular server, you would not generally do this.

There's some information and background on the internationalization/localization system used in MediaWiki at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:System_message

(This is not a how-to guide, though there are a number of specific tasks outlined. In general you are expected to be able to apply your learned knowledge through critical thinking and experimentation.)

As for the sidebar system specifically, I'm aware that it's pretty confusing. It's complex in part because it has several conflicting requirements for customizability, localization, and continued functionality in mixed-maintenance environments (eg where some, but not all languages are being actively maintained on the wiki).

In the future we may hope there will be a more "integrated" user-friendly way to set up sidebar entries. The current sidebar customization system is targetted at power users who are willing and able to figure out the quirks, but need to be able to edit it at the wiki admin level (through a MediaWiki: page) instead of the server admin level (through LocalSettings.php).

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)