Be Our Hero! Please?
Bawolff,
Thank you infinitely for the words. After much trying and failing, it seems the best bet is going to be to completely reinstall mediawiki and try to pull over everything from the last one. I've successfully gotten the new wiki up and running (using xampp) - version 1.19.1.
So far as I can tell, everything we did before was version 1.11.1, and I still have all the files and folders and pictures. Is it going to be possible to pull in all the pages from our earlier wiki? How? Anything specific I need to watch for?
Thank you endlessly in advance,
-Andy
Yes it should still be possible - However what you need is the database files, not the mediawiki files.
If you have the db set up with all the old wiki data, when you're installing the new version of MediaWiki, keep the old LocalSettings.php file from the previous wiki (assuming the information in it about the db is still accurate) and when you run the installer, the mediawiki installer should detect the old version and upgrade it.
Otherwise you could try replacing the db of an already installed new version of MediaWiki with the old DB, and then run update.php which will upgrade the db to be compatible with the new version of MediaWiki.
I've tried installing the new version, and I can get Mediawiki to recognize that there is an old database, but either I'm directing it to the wrong database or not doing it properly. All I can end up with is a brand new, unpopulated Wiki.
New approach: is there any way to just read the text of what was on the old wiki's pages? There were only a couple dozen pages, so re-creating wouldn't be too difficult, if I could see the text that was entered.
I'm also not EXACTLY sure what constitutes a "database" (files in folders? something only readable by software, etc), so be specific in where I should be looking if this is possible.
Really, I can't thank you enough. You've been very helpful so far. Apologies for my green-ness in this avenue.
-Andy
It may help if you can find the "my.cnf" file. There should be a line that looks like the following.
datadir = /var/lib/mysql
I do not know the windows equivalent but I need to type this into the command line using Ubuntu.
sudo ls /var/lib/mysql
One of the files should match the database file named in LocalSettings.php.
$wgDBname = "my_wiki";
I hope this helps.
> One of the files should match the database file named in LocalSettings.php.
If you are using MySQL, it actually should be a whole folder. Inside you have different files for the table definitions and contents. ;-)
You can copy this folder to create a kind of backup of your database, but this is not the recommended way of doing this. I would use a tool like phpMyAdmin. Your ex-coworker probably installed this together with Apache, MySQL and PHP, so that you can access it with your webbrowser by going to the according URL when the Apache and MySQL servers are running. This URL can vary; a common name is http://localhost/phpmyadmin.
