Dear List Members,
I'm new to this list and new to the wiki admin stuff. I need to start a wiki for my school. I'm not a programmer, but I will learn anything I a need to learn.
I need it for both the public use and intra-organizational use of the district I teach in, so some things will require a user log-in and others won't.
I have noticed there are several places to download wiki from, but I need to know what would be the best package to download that would be the easiest for me to set up with minimal programming requirements.
Any URLs and advice you can offer a newbie would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Cindy
Cindy,
Do you know anything about the environment you are going to be installing your wiki in? Are you using a Windows or a *nix computer to serve it? Do you know whether you will be using IIS or Apache? What versions of php and MySQL do you have at your disposal? This link will probably help you http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation On this list we obviously love MediaWiki, but are you sure that is the wiki software you want to go with? You said some areas of your wiki you need to log in to edit and some you don't, can you elaborate on that any? In the future, it is a good idea to make your subject a reader's digest version of your problem.
Good luck! -Courtney
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Cindy Livengood Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 7:35 AM To: mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Hello, newbie here.
Dear List Members,
I'm new to this list and new to the wiki admin stuff. I need to start a wiki for my school. I'm not a programmer, but I will learn anything I a need to learn.
I need it for both the public use and intra-organizational use of the district I teach in, so some things will require a user log-in and others won't.
I have noticed there are several places to download wiki from, but I need to know what would be the best package to download that would be the easiest for me to set up with minimal programming requirements.
Any URLs and advice you can offer a newbie would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Cindy _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 25/01/2008, Cindy Livengood cmlivengood@gmail.com wrote:
Dear List Members,
I'm new to this list and new to the wiki admin stuff. I need to start a wiki for my school. I'm not a programmer, but I will learn anything I a need to learn.
I need it for both the public use and intra-organizational use of the district I teach in, so some things will require a user log-in and others won't.
I have noticed there are several places to download wiki from, but I need to know what would be the best package to download that would be the easiest for me to set up with minimal programming requirements.
Any URLs and advice you can offer a newbie would be greatly appreciated.
Do you really expect anyone to suggest anything other than Mediawiki on the Mediawiki mailing list? ;)
The only wiki I have any experience of running (as opposed to just using) is Mediawiki, so I can't say if any others might be easier. You say you aren't a programmer, do you at least have experience of running websites? If not, I would suggest you learn with a simple website before trying anything as complicated as a wiki (while it's all going well, you shouldn't need much knowledge of websites, but things will go wrong eventually and you'll need to know what you're doing to fix it - especially as it's a work thing, not just for fun). If you know how to run a website, just not how to program, you should be able to cope with Mediawiki, as long as you don't want to do anything non-standard.
One thing I would suggest - don't try and use one wiki split between public and private use, Mediawiki certainly isn't set up to work like that (you can do it, but it isn't easy or reliable), and I doubt any other wikis are either. You would be much better off running two separate wikis - with Mediawiki you can set up interwiki links which make it extremely easy to link between the two (in the same way Wikipedia links between different languages). Then you can have one wiki public and one private, which is pretty easy to set up.
All the information you should need to set up Mediawiki is available at www.mediawiki.org
On 25/01/2008, Cindy Livengood cmlivengood@gmail.com wrote:
I'm new to this list and new to the wiki admin stuff. I need to start a wiki for my school. I'm not a programmer, but I will learn anything I a need to learn.
If you already have some sysadmin skills on your chosen platform (Linux/Unix or Windows), MediaWiki is marvellously easy to set up and use.
You will need to be comfortable working at the command line and editing configuration files - it's not a pointy-clicky installation, even though as much as possible is automated.
If you do feel confident at your abilities to do horrible things to your computer and have them work, I recommend MediaWiki wholeheartedly :-)
You don't need to be a programmer - I'm not. (Though Unix sysadmins tend to pick up coding and code reading to some degree.)
- d.
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org