Manual talk:System administration

Getting administrative rights
It's written: "MediaWiki does not yet have an interface for setting the user_rights field of user accounts." BUT Special:Makesysop should be considered!

oliver


 * True, but the MakeSysop page that "ships" with MediaWiki only supports promoting users to sysop and bureaucrat, and doesn't support demoting them, or selecting other user types. There is an extension to do that, which we could mention, and link to. Rob Church Talk 21:05, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Section 3.7.6 Inserting new pages into the database
The key to this is to insert rows into the cur table. Specifically, you need to fill the fields cur.cur_title and cur.cur_text. They contain the page titles and the wiki text, respectively. This is enough to start at. However, link tables must still be updated so the "What links here" etc. pages will work. I've been playing with entering new pages directly into the MySQL database using the INSERT functions. From what I can tell, however, creating a new record with just cur.cur_title and cur.cur_text isn't enough. I think you also have to set cur.cur_is_new to 1 for the page to show up as having content, at least in MediaWiki 1.4.5. This suggests that you could populate a local Wiki using delimited text files and LOAD DATA INFILE in MySQL (or that a simple script could do this running a loop and using INSERT statements). This requires privileges on the database, of course. Is this correct? If so, I guess the content page should be edited, but since I'm a newbie I hesitate to change it without asking first.

jimhu

Put md5sum.exe to work
Which folder do I place this file in, for it to check uploads? Many thanks.

Edit the default navigation box to include custom links
This turns out to be in the file "xhtml_slim.pt" within the Templates folder. I wish it were a wiki page instead!!!


 * It is. See MediaWiki:Sidebar.

Change the default icon and background image
OK. I think I figured this one out. They are in the "Stylesheets folder", under the name of the style template you are using. Note: They are not in the "templates" folder. They are PNG files.

Actually, the icon needs to be changed at the top level of the Stylesheets folder, not within the specific template (although it exists there as well).


 * Or set the $wgLogoPath variable in LocalSettings.php.

- Modify the URL scheme so it respects the URL forwarding I'm already using. (i.e. The domain my wiki is hosted on is not the same as the URL I wish to use, so all liks at www.myhost.com/... should be forwarded to www.mydomain.com/...) Ideally, I'd like to combine this with some kind of URL redirection so that I don't see the annoying index.php links on all the pages.

The second half of this question is answered in Rewrite_Rules, but not the first half. (Although I can't get my .htaccess file to work.)

Thanks for your help!

Luhmann

I added the header tags to your entry so it would show up in the TOC - jimhu
 * I tidied up a couple of header tags to make your queries flow better, and answered (I hope) two of them. Rob Church Talk 21:03, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Granting user rights
The latest MediaWiki supports granting sysop rights through the UI, so you don't have to use a SQL statement any longer. Update this doc to reflect that? --209.6.144.65 19:51, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In section 3.1 (enabling and disabling downloads) it would be nice to have more information, such as-- what do the ImageMagick lines do? Thanks, Chira 06:35, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * 1) $wgUseImageMagick = true;
 * 2) $wgImageMagickConvertCommand = "/usr/bin/convert";

Uploads disabled by default?
In section 3.1 it says: "In newer versions of the MediaWiki software, starting with version 1.1.0 from 2003-12-08, uploads are disabled by default because of security considerations." But after installing 1.4 beta 3, I look in the generated LocalSettings.php and "$wgDisableUploads = false;". And uploads do work. So this is inconsistent I think. ErikH2000 07:36, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * The generated file has that line, commented out, so you can remove the comment marker to easily enable uploads. Uploads remain disabled unless you do so. --brion 08:13, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Doh! You are right, that line is commented out, and I feel silly. I guess I got confused because I am still able to upload files on the same installation where the $wgDisableUploads line in LocalSettings.php is commented out. There is no other occurrence of $wgDisableUploads in the file. I uploaded several images and displayed them. The last one was with an account that had no special privileges. So I don't know if I have a bug or simply misunderstand what the expected behavior is when uploads are disabled. ErikH2000 11:53, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

cleaning up the database
is this really correct?

mysqldump -uusername -ppassword databasename > file.sql

mysqldump -uusername -ppassword databasename | ssh user@host "cat > remote_file"

mysql -uusername -ppassword databasename < file.sql

shouldn't there be a space between "-u" and "username" and  "-p" and "password" ?


 * either works. -- Jdowland 13:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Problems saving this article
I tried to add back a link to MediaWiki Documentation on the first line, and it let me preview, but failed to let me make the edit. Not sure what to do from there... (it dissapeared on Dec 2,2004 for some reason)

Updating user rights as described doesn't work.
In order to give myself sysop privileges, I had to do the following instead:

update user, user_rights set ur_rights = 'sysop' where user.user_name = 'me' and user.user_id = user_rights.ur_user;

It looks like there's a UI for this in 1.4, so maybe that's why the documentation hasn't been updated; the UI isn't going to work with, e.g., the LDAP patch, though, unless the WikiSysop user appears in the LDAP database.

Yah, the documentation is laughably wrong, the wrong column names, etc.


 * Did you read the directions for the right version? Note that it's significantly different between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5. --brion 08:09, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

File Extensions when uploading
I've allowed File-Uploads. When I try to upload a file it says: ".txt is not an recommended fileformat". How can I switch it?


 * i have the same problem. is it possible to upload any content??? --Manfred
 * i´ve found an answer: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Images_and_other_uploaded_files#Uploading --Manfred

tdb?
What does tbd mean?


 * I think "to be done", but shows that various verbs can come after "to be": discussed, determined, etc.--Patrick 06:47, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

how to change skin?
Hi,

I tried to change the skin as proposed in the localsetting.php but it seems impossible.

$wgDefaultSkin = 'cologneblue';
 * 1) Default skin: you can change the default skin. Use the internal symbolic
 * 2) names, ie 'standard', 'nostalgia', 'cologneblue', 'monobook':

I well placed this file in the root but nothing changed.

What's wrong

precision: I am new in the Wiki world. I tried to search any response everywhere but nothing good.

can anybody help me?

Thanks in advance


 * You placed the file in the root? You need to modify the LocalSettings.php file that is in the MediaWiki folder.
 * For example, if MediaWiki was installed to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mw16 (/var/wwwroot for you Unix users) then you'd need to edit c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mw16\LocalSettings.php (or /var/wwwroot/LocalSettings.php) to include that line, which ought to pre-exist.
 * If you *did* edit that file, try moving the line to the bottom of the LocalSettings.php file (but above the closing ?> tag), which will ensure it is the value that is used.
 * Hope this helps. Rob Church Talk 20:59, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

How to Temp. Disable Wiki.
I have been preparing to install a new wiki at its own domain. I have a lot of documents (that are unfortuneatley not in a sql dump), templates, graphics etc that are all part of it. Is there a way I can install a wiki, but disable it for casual visitors until we have most of our content and templates added.
 * If you mean preventing users from accessing it, you could temporarily add HTTP folder protection under Apache, thus requiring users to enter a username and password just to view the wiki pages. In my opinion, that is a bit overkill. If it were me, I'd just add a polite, "Getting things finalised; please bear with us as things change" notice to the main page and let people at it anyway; but that's just me. Rob Church Talk 21:38, 21 September 2005 (UTC)