[Mediawiki-l] namespaces in relation to initial installationand configuration

[Platonides]

William van Zwanenberg wrote:
>>> 3.       How can I generate a list of all articles with links to
>>> corresponding article page contained within a given namespace and
>>> display this in a "special" wiki page (article)? 
> 
>> Not sure what you want here. Does Special:WhatLinksHere fits your
> needs?
>> It can also be reached from the toolbox.
> 
> Not really. My apologies, I should have explained this in more detail.
> 
> To give one very simple example of what it is I'm trying to achieve, I
> want to put all "help" related pages, in a namespace called "help." All
> articles within this namespace will, as the name suggests, be pages
> offering guidance of how to navigate one's way around the wiki, search
> for content and edit/modify existing content etc, etc. In order to make
> finding the specific "help" page one might potentially require, it would
> be helpful to create an index article page that did itself, list all
> other pages (articles) within the namespace.
> 
> So, using my example, if there were say 20 pages within the help
> namespace, I'd want to create a "Help:IndexPage" page that listed all 20
> pages and included internal links to take you to the page in question. 
> 
> I hope this makes sense.  


The easiest way would be putting {{Special:Allpages/Help:}} at
Help:IndexPage.
That would include there the list from that namespace that
Special:Allpages generates.



>>> In addition to answering these questions, I would be grateful if
>>> somebody could reply to this message by explaining in greater detail
> the
>>> process of editing articles within the "mediawiki" namespace so that
> I
>>> can go about changing the appearance of the master templates (and
> hence
>>> the look and feel of the wiki as a whole) and so that I can go about
>>> adding 3rd party extensions that will increase functionality.
> 
>> They are edited just as any other page, but they are used by the
>> software for different functionalities. As it would be dangerous to
>> allow its editing to anyone, you need to be a wiki admin in order to
>> edit pages there.
> 
> I believe I have given myself wiki admin rights based on the account I
> created for myself but I'm not certain. I apologise if this is a very
> elementary question to be asking, but can someone tell me how I might
> check this and more importantly, how I go about changing my account
> status if I haven't given myself the appropriate access rights?


Go to Special:Listusers You should see there the groups you are in: eg.
(sysop, bureaucrat)
The account created during install is an administrator account.
A bureaucrat can make other people an admin. That's done from
Special:UserRights.



> I'm not entirely sure I understand your question but what I can tell you
> is this. I've only step the wiki up in what can only be described as a
> sandbox server. In actuality, it's running on nothing more than a
> standalone, non-networked windows PC and is using a XAMPP architecture. 
> 
> The wiki is operating off localhost. 
> 
> The URL to access the wiki is: http://localhost/eurowiki/
> 
> Which, for reasons I don't quite understand seems to actually result in
> the following URI actually being loaded:
> http://localhost/eurowiki/index.php/Main_Page
> 
> Given that I want to assign pages to namespaces, and I want to edit the
> MediaWiki.Common.css page, I need to resolve this issue as soon as
> possible.
> 
> Many thanks.

That configuration should be ok. So, if you go to
http://localhost/eurowiki/index.php/MediaWiki:Common.css you see a
message of "Access denied" provided by the web server ? (ie. no sidebar
or other part coming from the wiki)
Does it work if you use instead
http://localhost/eurowiki/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css  ?