Manual:Installing third-party tools

This page provides information on installing third party tools for MediaWiki like ImageMagick, sendmail, and Texvc. None of these tools will do much good 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 imagemagick.org. GD can be downloaded from boutell.com/gd Neither of these are part of the default MediaWiki installation.

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 point the variable Manual:$wgUseImageMagick to the  or   variable on your computer. For information on configuring MediaWiki for images in general see Manual:Image Administration and Manual:Configuration settings. For information on installing ImageMagick on Windows, see Manual:Newcomers guide to installing on Windows.

Mathematical formulae
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. (See blahtex for information about current work on adding MathML support.)

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. To 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