Notes from a regular user's perspective.
—[[User:Rylie_James_Thomas|rjt]] ([[User_talk:Rylie_James_Thomas|talk]])
— [[User:Rjt|rjt]] ([[User_talk:Rjt|talk]])
Note's from an admin's perspective.
Like DokuWiki, Mediawiki has a dedicated syntax for interwiki links. Practically, they're a quick way to link to other sites, so useful for one's you link to often.
The easiest way to add links is to use the included Interwiki extension, which requires a little manual setup: Just add these lines to your LocalSettings.php file
wfLoadExtension( 'Interwiki' ); $wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['interwiki'] = true;
If you want to add little icons before/after links like in Dokuwiki, you can use the CSS :before or :after
The default Mediawiki search is pretty shit. Autocomplete doesn't work unless you get the page name right (including case), and it seems to miss stuff in the results page.
I haven't tried this, but it looks like you can customise syntax pretty easily:
Templates are a really useful tool for inserting information on multiple pages. They can be simple—like insert a single word; or complex—like the 'infoboxes' you see on Wikipedia pages, and even using conditional statements.
To save people the hassle of having to copy+paste the template text each time, you can add a button to the editor:
And include 'template data' into your templates so they'll show up.
There are a few different ways to theme MediaWiki.
MediaWiki:Common.css, which will apply to all skins and themes, and MediaWiki:[theme].css if you want to limit it to a particular theme.
My theme for the Game Making Tools Wiki is built on top of the Timeless skin. rjt/mediawiki-theme-timeless-gmt. For some reason on this wiki theme's don't work, so I use the Common.css file :/
My theme for the Videogame Interface Wiki is built on the new Vector 2022 skin, but it's arse and breaks often. I'm going to switch to Timeless for that one too.
Mediawiki skins are way too complicated, I think I've given up on ever creating one.
Just looking for Mediawiki skins is annoying! MediaWiki's wiki has a section that collects some together, but there's no gallery of screenshots.
These notes are from when I was looking for a new skin for Game Making Tools's wiki (ended up going with Timeless). Looking for something with a narrower reading area1), produces nice markup, and uses grid.
Vetoed:
The documentation on using themes is terrible: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Theme
Here's what you need to do:
In LocalSettings.php set:
wfLoadExtension( 'Theme' );$wgDefaultTheme = [theme];
In extensions/Theme/extension.json you need two sections, which you probably have to create:
"ThemeModules": {
"[skin]": [ "[theme]" ]
},
and in the resourcemodules section:
"themeloader.skins.[skin].[theme]": {
"styles": {
"[skin]/[theme]/[theme].css": {
"media": "screen"
}
}
}
The path/file in the 'styles' bit points to your CSS file.
When you refer to your skin in these files use lowercase.