User:Applicationswhisperer

In learning how to use and administer MediaWiki, I found that many of the Help articles were directed at folks who had an understanding of PHP and MySQL, and/or had years of developer experience. All of the command-line instructions were a bit intimidating to see. This article is intended for folks (like me) who are new to MediaWiki, are using MediaWiki on a hosted site, or have little-to-no experience managing websites.

As a technical writer, I follow the "See one, Do one, Teach one" philosophy of learning. This article is my "Teach one" advice to build an online help system using MediaWiki on a hosted site.

How we Built Two Help Sites from One Instance of MediaWiki

 * About Me:

I have experience in product marketing, user training, technical communications and support desk operations:
 * I am comfortable diagnosing and solving most user-level PC/application issues
 * I know just enough about DOS/UNIX/LINUX commands to be dangerous
 * Until now, I have used other tools to create user documentation (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, DreamWeaver, Acrobat Suites), plus some of the early programming languages...so, Fortran, Cobol and BASIC, yes,...PHP and mySQL, not so much, but learning very quickly

Currently, I'm a technical writer in the SF Bay area. Contact me at eyoder at gmail dot com.

I recently installed WAMP - very cool - I can play with the wiki locally. Applicationswhisperer 19:14, 3 April 2009 (UTC)