[Mediawiki-l] Question on how to enable Portals for mediawiki on private install

[John Stecher]

Folks I am really stuck on the following issue and would appreciate any help
you can give me.

It is a fairly simple one is that I am wondering how can I setup and
configure a local install inside my own network to allow for portals to be
created?  I am working on a project for myself and want to give it a portal
interface for those in my organization to be able to get updated content as
soon as possible.  I wish I could just add the portal to wikipedia because I
have created it many times there and it just works but on my local install I
just get strange page formatting.

For example when following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal I
just get the following printed out on the window after saving the main
Portal:Topic page {{Portal:box-footer | {{{1}}} }}.  The result for the
headers and foots are no different.  Its almost as if the {{ directives are
just being removed and the rest of the text just is left hanging then.

I have went through the steps of adding the Portal namespace and enabling
subpages but am stuck as can be.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

John