[Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?

[Rob Church]

On 05/06/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon at uspto.gov> wrote:
> Wow, there's 145 pages of unintelligible documentation at
> http://yourwiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=html and
> http://yourwiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=php - no
> wonder it's hard to find quick answers for MediaWiki inquires.

Well, those are the generators for the internal language file format,
not documentation.

> ... so someone would find it by searching for ... which term?

You would, of course, do the polite thing, and read the FAQ and
mailing list archives, which would reveal this answer over and over
and over...

> Say a user asks me to change the logo - where do I find the control for
> that?

Someone pinch me and confirm we do have a couple of copies of an FAQ,
and that I haven't been in some enormous hallucination for the past 22
months?

> Say the next user wants me to change the wording of the tabs across the
> top - where's the control for that?

If searching Special:Allmessages doesn't produce the answer, one might
then ask a specific question like, "how do I change the tabs across
the top of each page?" on this mailing list.

> MediaWiki, however, has no such master "names of parts" page that I can
> find, making it hard to find the control for any MediaWiki screen
> element I'm staring right at!  And when we do have something on screen
> with an apparent name, it seems to be controlled by something under
> another name, such as, "discussion" is really "talk" and:
>
> on-screen "navigation"
> ... = MediaWiki:Sidebar
> ... = http://{your wiki's URL}/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar
>
> And so on.  That's why I asked for help finding the names of the

> ... now if I can only get permission to install Firefox ...!!!

Irrelevant.

> ... dang, Mike, spread the target w-i-d-e so it's impossible for me to
> hit, why dontchya?

* For user interface text and some, limited additional elements, such
as the navigation bar, one edits the MediaWiki namespace
* For site configuration settings, one edits the site configuration
file, LocalSettings.php
* To change appearance, one edits the stylesheet, because that is how
web pages tend to be formatted these days


Rob Church