Putting MediaWiki to use in an organization

Imagine how useful it would be to have an online knowledge base that can easily be updated created by key people within your organization. That’s the promise of a wiki — a Web application that “allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily,” as Wikipedia, perhaps the best-known wiki, puts it. Why not bring the benefits of a wiki to your organization?

If you’re sold on the concept, the first thing you need to do is to pick the software that you’re going to use for your wiki. If you want hunt around to find out what’s out there, a good place to start is Wikipedia’s wiki software wiki. If you say, “I’ll use whatever Wikipedia is using,” that’ll be MediaWiki.

MediaWiki installation is easy — either follow the instructions on MediaWiki’s site or read “The open source wiki behind Wikipedia.” Install MediaWiki on a server that can be seen by everyone in your organization. You’ll then be able to access it from a Web browser by typing in something like http://servername/wiki.

With a brand new wiki there’s absolutely no security or control built into it. Anyone that can access the Web page will be able to add pages, comments, and discussions. We’re going to stop that. First add a new user account — you’ll need to be able to log on once you’ve disabled anonymous access. Next, find the LocalSettings.php file in your wiki directory. Add the following lines:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

With that done, anyone on the network will be able to view the wiki, but only someone with an account will be able to create or edit pages.

You may also want to enhance the wiki pages by adding PHP functionality. To do this, add a function into the includes/Setup.php file:

function ParsePHPTag($Content)
{
 global $wgOut;
 $wgOut->enableClientCache(false);
 ob_start();
 eval($Content);
 $Result = ob_get_contents();
 ob_end_clean();
  return($Result);
}
$wgParser->setHook('php','ParsePHPTag');

Then, if you want to use PHP in any of your wiki pages, don’t use the normal <?PHP … ?> tags; instead use <PHP> … </PHP>.

Now you can even access data in a MySQL database by adding code like this to a wiki page:

<PHP>

$db = mysql_connect("localhost", "userid", "userpassword");
mysql_select_db("cstellar",$db);

$result = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(*) stars FROM chyg85",$db);

printf("Records: %sn", mysql_result($result,0,"stars"));
</PHP>

In this example, all I’m doing is connecting to a database and counting the number of records in a table. Obviously you’d have to use your own database and user details.

MediaWiki is based on PHP, and so as well as being able to use any PHP functionality within a page, you can actually build your own extensions to MediaWiki. If you’re interested in doing that, have a look at MediaWiki’s documentation on extending wiki markup.

While you’re setting parameters, look at your php.ini file. In php.ini, the line session.gc_maxlifetime sets the length of time (in seconds) that a PHP session is allowed to exist, like this:

session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

This means that if you’re editing the wiki then you must click on the “Save page” button at least once every 24 minutes or risk losing your work. You can increase the time to a value that will suit you better — say to one hour, or 3600 seconds.

At this point you may be saying, “There’s nothing here that I can’t do with a text editor, an ordinary Web server, and giving group access to the Web files.” True — so let’s see where the wiki comes into its own. Try editing the Main page, save the changes, and then click on the History tab. You’ll see that MediaWiki tracks who made all changes and when. You can compare the differences between different versions. In one fell swoop you’ve got yourself a document management system as well as a potential in-house knowledge base.

“Aha!” I hear you say, “if this is just operating in a browser then how can I do spell check or word counts? What about formating?” If you use Firefox as your browser, you can add Firefox extensions to implement those functions. If you’re using Firefox 1.5.x, install Spellbound dev and restart Firefox. When you then try editing one of your wiki pages, you’ll find that misspelled words are underlined in red. Right-clicking in any editing areas (text boxes, for example) will allow you to display the spell check front end. Once there then it’s just like spell checking in any other application.

It’s just as easy to get a word count going, this time use roachfiend.com’s Word Count. Again, don’t forget to restart Firefox after installing the extension. However, the word count doesn’t work within the text editing areas. to get around that problem, click MediaWiki’s “Show Preview” button tp see your work displayed as a normal Web page. Now you can then select any area of the text, right-click on it, and you’ll see that “Word Count” function is available. Click on it to see the number of words in a message box.

Finally you can install a WYSYWIG HTML editor called Xinha Here! Both the spell check and word count extensions also work in the Xinha window.

With MediaWiki set up, you’re ready to create your knowledge base; I can’t help you there, it’s all up to you. MediaWiki and the Firefox extensions have enhanced the way that I do my day-to-day work, and I’m sure that they can revolutionize the flow of information and knowledge around your organization.