Manual:Installing third-party tools

This page provides information on installing third party tools for MediaWiki like ImageMagick, sendmail, and Texvc. MediaWiki doesn't come with any of these tools and doesn't require any of them to run. None of these tools will do much good in regard to MediaWiki unless you've already installed MediaWiki. For more information see Manual:Installation.

Image thumbnailing
Image thumbnailing requires either ImageMagick or GD library. ImageMagick is recommended since it produces better quality thumbnails. It can be downloaded from http://www.imagemagick.org. GD can be downloaded from http://boutell.com/gd.

ImageMagick
MediaWiki can be configured to use ImageMagick to do dynamic resizing and thumbnailing of images. ImageMagick is available for Windows, Unix, Mac OS, and Linux from http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php. Once ImageMagick is installed, you must enable ImageMagick and point MediaWiki to the  or   program on your computer in LocalSettings.php like this:

For information on configuring MediaWiki for images in general see and Manual:Configuration settings. For information on installing ImageMagick on Windows, see Manual:Running MediaWiki on Windows - as PHP on Windows comes now with GD, it is now recommended to use GD instead of ImageMagick.

Mathematical formulae

 * See Extension:Math

MediaWiki uses a subset of TeX markup, including some extensions from LaTeX and AMSLaTeX, for mathematical formulae. It generates either PNG images or simple HTML markup, depending on user preferences and the complexity of the expression. In the future, as more browsers are smarter, it will be able to generate enhanced HTML or even MathML in many cases.

More precisely, MediaWiki filters the markup through Texvc, which in turn passes the commands to TeX for the actual rendering. Thus, only a limited part of the full TeX language is supported; for details see m:Help:Displaying a formula

System-generated e-mails
MediaWiki by default uses sendmail to send email notifications to users if they are enabled in the wiki and in the users preferences. Sendmail comes installed by default on Unix and Linux systems. For a Windows version see http://www.indigostar.com/sendmail.htm. Once sendmail is installed, you must modify your php.ini file to point PHP at the correct sendmail executable. For a Windows based example, see Manual:Newcomers guide to installing on Windows/PHP php.ini

Caching

 * Manual:Squid
 * memcached

Tidy

 * See Manual:$wgUseTidy 

See also Manual:$wgTidyInternal for installation instructions, or Manual:Build Tidy from source.