Manual talk:MediaWiki architecture

"scarier" is the word. Hmm. Does anyone outside WikiPedia actually use this set up? Certainly for read only stuff it is easier to knock up something in Perl from scratch --(talk)AndrewCates 07:43, 22 May 2004 (UTC) test


 * Hundreds of people use this setup, it's not hard. You don't have to understand it. If you already have PHP, Apache and MySQL installed (which many hosting services do), it's just a matter of untarring the package, running the web-based installer, moving the config file, and you're done. -- Tim Starling 03:49, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

The hard part comes after the setup
Changing aspects of the software can be a daunting task, because often there's multiple ways of achieving it. For instance, to disable a link in the navigation-block you could use css and set the display to none (but that would only work in that skin), or you could go into the xhtml_slim.pt template and use comments to disable the link, or even delete the complete  there. Or you could not add the url to the nav_urls in SkinPHPTal.php, because display of some links is based on the condition that it exists in the nav_urls. So there's three ways (maybe even more, because the older skins don't use the PHPTal template) of doing it. And to make matters worse, this particular thing changed with the 1.4 version, so now there's even more ways to do it, and the 'documentation' is very difficult to understand, since it's maintained at about a dozen different places by a lot of different people.