[Mediawiki-l] Questions about Script Uri Path

[Rowan Collins]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 21:23:28 -0600, =James Birkholz= wrote:
> I'm curious what a "virtual host" is, since I didn't do anything with this
> when I installed.

A "virtual host" is simply a way of configuring one computer to behave
differently depending what name or address was used to access it. In
this case, "mediawiki.silibug.com" is probably the same server as
"silibug.com", but needs to behave as though it were its own
webserver, with its own root directory, etc.

> I see that WikiPedia uses a domain "server-type" prefix for the alternate
> language versions (?namespaces?), but don't think that I can do that with
> my rented hosting (I don't have admin rights - LunarPages). 

As far as I know, the different languages can have whatever URLs you
want them to, as long as you configure MediaWiki to know this. For
instance, it seems wikitravel.org uses the convention
http://wikitravel.org/<XX>/<article>/<page title>, where <XX> is the
language code and <article> is an appropriate translation of the word
"article".
 
[BTW, I believe the "en" part of "en.wikipedia.org" is properly known
as a "sub-domain". There is no better technical name for different
language versions, but I believe the codes they use are based
more-or-less on ISO 639 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639]

> In a related vein, is it safe to say that with a cheap hosted web
> situation, I'm stuck with "ugly URLs"? I've noticed a discussion in the
> install notes about a complicated work around, but I'm assuming that it was
> only an option if you had admin rights on the server(s).

I don't know about this one; people do some awfully weird voodoo with
Apache's rewrite rules (which don't necessarily need "admin" rights,
because you may have the right to change certain settings within your
own space) but a lot of the time, they just get awfully confused...

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]