Why is there a reliance on manually editing
LocalSettings.php and uploading it to the site?
Why is there not an Admin page that edits this online?
"Config file vs. GUI admin page" is a religious issue for systems in general. If
you're running one just one wiki, say, as a hobby, then a GUI would probably be
simpler. As the sysadmin of 15+ MediaWiki sites (config file) and 10+ WordPress sites (GUI
that saves to a database) at a company, however, I have found MediaWiki's config files
much easier to maintain than WordPress's settings GUI & database, to keep the
settings of all our sites in sync. (With a GUI you often want a database, not a config
file, to support concurrent edits by multiple admins.)
Config files have these advantages:
1. Config changes can easily be tracked, rolled back, diffed, etc., using any
off-the-shelf version control system. (Even if your GUI can generate a config file to be
version controlled, you don't know that its final form will exactly reflect the change
you made: the "save" function might reorder lines, reformat the text, add
unwanted commands that set default values, etc. This screws up diffs.)
2. "Undo" is easy, no matter how long ago you made the change. When I change
settings in the WordPress GUI and click "OK" or "Save", I sometimes
have to work hard to roll back those changes or even remember what they were.
3. You can put anything you want into the MediaWiki config file (arbitrary PHP code)
instead of whatever limited functionality that the GUI designers believed would be useful.
This is invaluable. Possibly you could factor out the simpler settings into a GUI tool.
4. Config files are easily deployed to multiple targets as part of a formal release
process: e.g., rsync to your 10+ wikis. With WordPress, I pull my hair out every time an
admin makes a change through the GUI on one site and doesn't document it. It can be
hard to identify that change so it can be documented, version-controlled, and deployed to
other sites.
5. With config files, you can use your favorite editor (emacs, vi, etc.) instead of
whatever the GUI designer gives you, which means I can work faster with fewer errors using
familiar tools.
The main advantage of a GUI, if it's designed VERY well, is simplicity, making
administration accessible to less technical people. That's not an issue for my team
(we're all technical). But I can imagine that a GUI for changing basic MediaWiki
settings would be useful for some admins.
DanB