User:MarkJurgens/VESetup

This page is intended for less experienced users to help them setup MediaWiki's new Visual Editor. It's a great piece of software that will change your user's wiki experience completely, but the task of setting it up is a little daunting.

What you'll need
First off, you'll need A VPS or a cloud based server that gives you root access. Most basic packages from hosting companies are NOT good enough because they don't give you something called root access (also known as command line access). To run VE, you'll need to get in 'behind the scenes' and run a small program in the background called Parsoid.

What you'll need to know
You'll need to know how to setup MediaWiki manually. If you have used an installer like softalicious, or asked your hosting provider to setup the wiki for you, you need to get familiar with setting it up manually before attempting to setup VE. Manual installation is a much better idea in general for a number of reasons.

The installation guide for Mediawiki is very detailed. Download from the actual software here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23

= Step 1 - Download the Software =

Mediawiki 1.23.1
This is the latest 'stable release' that I'll be working with at this point, you can get it here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

Visual Editor Extension
You'll also need to download the Visual Editor Extension. There is a link on that page to 'snapshot made for Mediawiki 1.23.

Parsoid Extension
This is the hard part. Parsoid has a few parts. If you're running 1.23+, then you'll need to install an 'extension': https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Parsoid Note, for later releases of mediawiki (1.24+) You won't need it.

Setup

 * 1) Install Mediawiki Manally (1.23)
 * 2) Download the VE extension, upload it to your /extensions folder.

Todo:
Install this extension (only for 1.23)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Parsoid