User:Fo0bar/MediaWiki root articles

One of my pet peeves is seeing wiki URLs such as  http://www.example.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page . There are many recipes out there for shortening that to "Wikipedia-style" URLs such as  http://www.example.com/wiki/Main_Page , but I wanted to take it further. I wanted simply  http://www.example.com/  to be the home page, and  http://www.example.com/Other_Article  to be a normal article.

Installation

 * Set up a normal MediaWiki installation in the directory /w under the document root.
 * Edit /w/LocalSettings.php.
 * Edit the virtual host's .htaccess.

One step further: action URL rewrites
The above process makes the article URLs look pretty, but index.php is still referenced in most actions. To solve that, we can use mod_rewrite to map to better URLs, and tell MediaWiki to use them for actions. In this guide,  http://www.example.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=edit  becomes  http://www.example.com/w/action/edit/Main_Page </tt>.

.htaccess configuration
Insert the following above the RewriteCond</tt>s above: