[Mediawiki-l] moving wiki "root"?

[Paul C Lustgarten]

Hi, Nina, and welcome to the list.  This is one of my first posts, too!

At the risk of being politically incorrect, I fully share your  
preference for short & simple URLs on my wikis.  I've been using them  
on two wikis; one in light-duty production use for more than a year,  
and the other being my personal-use development wiki (both on a  
private corporate intranet).  The particular method I've used is the  
one documented here:

	http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Short_URL#URL_like_-_example.com.2FPage_title

The one precondition for that, and the rest of what I have to offer,  
is that you have full administrative access to (or at least a friendly  
administrator of) your DNS system, your Apache server config, and of  
course the wiki config itself.  I'm hoping those are fair assumptions  
for an "academic library environment" (or most intranet settings) like  
you have.

One step that I HIGHLY recommend, and which resolves many of the  
objections otherwise raised against this approach, is that you make  
your wiki live in a "virtual domain", so that the domain name is, by  
definition, the name for your wiki service alone (and NOT the name of  
a host, from which you might one day want to offer other (non-wiki)  
services).   So, if you were operating a "New Media" wiki for your  
organization running on the "library.myorg.org" machine (maybe on the  
impact of new media on the very concept of a library), you might set  
aside a "CNAME" in your DNS of "new-media.myorg.org", and configure  
your Apache server running on "library.myorg.org" to serve a "virtual  
server" identified by that CNAME.  (The CNAME can be most anything you  
like, as long as it doesn't collide with any other name already in  
use.)  Then, even if you one day discover you need to move your wiki  
to some other machine, you have carefully and completely insulated it  
from the name of the underlying host machine (well, as long as your  
move keeps the wiki somewhere under the "myorg.org" domain).  Then,  
when you have your "Glossary" page, the URL for it will be simply "new- 
media.myorg.org/Glossary" ... sweet!

Oh, and as for converting a wiki that already has content, I had to do  
just that with my development installation (which I picked up from  
another guy after we'd already been putting content on it for a  
while).  Since the method described in the link above is just a set of  
rewrite rules, applied by Apache and by the wiki itself, I didn't  
actually have to *move* any of the content at all (nor images or  
extensions or anything) - everything within the wiki just continued to  
work, under the new names.  (In fact, moving any of those files will  
likely break things!)  Of course, any links stored *external* to the  
wiki, like in someone's bookmarks folder, would all have to be  
updated.  With a (relatively) young wiki, that will hopefully not be a  
problem.

The only constraint I've noticed in operating my wikis this way is  
that it doesn't work to use certain special characters in a page or  
section title.  I *think* this might be the same problem as is  
documented here:

	http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Short_URL#Ampersand_.28.26.29_problem

Frankly, though, that hasn't been enough of a nuisance for me to even  
diagnose it further ... I just avoid funny characters in my titles. :-)

Anyway, good luck, and I hope that helps.  Let us know how it works  
for you.

	Paul


On Apr 22, 2009, at 2:11 AM, McHale, Nina wrote:

> Hi, all,
>
> First post--please don't hurt me. :)
>
> I installed MediaWiki a couple of months ago to begin using as an  
> intranet for about 80 people in an academic library environment. At  
> the time, the idea was to only have a portion of the intranet be a  
> wiki. Now, I'm sold, and I want to make the wiki the environment for  
> the whole intranet. Question: how do I move the wiki files from / 
> siterootfolder/wiki/ to just having the wiki files be the site root?  
> Can I just dump them into the site root folder, or would that break  
> stuff, including the existing articles? :)
>
> Part of my motivation for doing this is shortening URLs even more:
>
> http://hostname/wiki/My_Article_Title
>
> http://hostname/My_Article_Title
>
> I feel like if the intranet is contained entirely within the wiki,  
> we don't need the extra /wiki/ in the URL.
>
> Does MediaWiki work okay installed in the site root folder? Oh, and  
> of course, there is already content in the wiki...
>
> Thanks in advance for your help,
>
> Nina

______________
Paul C Lustgarten
AT&T Labs - Research
Florham Park, NJ
+1 973 360 7206