On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Daniel Barrett <danb(a)vistaprint.com> wrote:
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
Ironic, but a wiki page itself has most of those advantages.
--Fred