Topic on Project:Support desk

I have a wiki up and running (www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki if you're interested). As far as I know everything works as expected, and as the admin I'm able to use all special pages and edit all common pages. Except the ones in the MediaWiki namespace. Specifically, I can't edit MediaWiki:Common.css.

As soon as I navigate to that page, the interface looks as if I'm not logged in: The "log out" link changes to "log in", there is no edit tab etc.

Now, I'm pretty sure I caused this, either with the phpbb authentication plugin or with the plain url settings in apache, the latter which look like this:

 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule ^/?wiki(/[^/]*)?$ /home/joepal/mediawiki/index.php [L]
 RewriteRule ^/?wiki(/Special.*)?$ /home/joepal/mediawiki/index.php [L]
 RewriteRule ^/?wiki(/MediaWiki.*)?$ /home/joepal/mediawiki/index.php [L]
 Alias /wiki /home/joepal/mediawiki

... but, can anyone suggest where/how to start debug this?

Your RewriteRules look strange; they will do funny things and they are not standard. The alias directive will only work if used inside a server config or virtual host file - it will not work in .htaccess.

You should once go through this page Manual:Short_URL/Apache and configure your wiki accordingly!

I had the same problem with MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Common.js.

• MediaWiki 1.26.1

• Chrome 47.0.2526.106 m

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.7 (Santiago)

• Complicating feature: I'm using Varnish on this server. I edited Common.cs on my localhost installation (Windows 7, WAMPserver 3) and on another server (CentOS release 6.7 Final) without any difficulty.

On other pages in the wiki, I was recognized as logged-in and could create and edit pages as normal.

When I tried to access Common.css, my user ID disappeared from the top of the page and was replaced by the "Log in" link.

I figured that there must be a cookie problem of some kind.

Clearing my browser cache and logging back in did not help.

No amount of reloading the page helped.

Two failed workarounds:

• $wgGroupPermissions['user']['editinterface'] = true;

• $wgGroupPermissions['editcss']['editinterface'] = true;

The solution for me was to hand-edit the URL from http://... to https://...

I'm baffled, but happy enough. So far as I can tell, I haven't required admins to be logged in securely in order to edit the interface, but it seems like a reasonable idea.