Calivia

While setting up a new MediaWiki yesterday, I ran into a bug that has already been sitting on MySQL's bug tracker for 2 years. There are plenty of applications (MediaWiki, Mambo, ezPublish, MythTV, Jahia, ...) that cannot be installed because of this bug and still MySQL tags the bug as a "feature request". The problem with using utf-8 in the MediaWiki ''job'' table below is that 3 bytes are reserved for every character and the compound key used in that table blows the maximum size of 1000 bytes set for keys. The key ''job_cmd, job_namespace, job_title'' uses 3x (255+9+255) characters = 1557 bytes. Why would one want to have keys in utf-8 anyways?

User rights management was very limited in MediaWiki 1.4 and below. The model has been extended to a full-blown user and group rights management in MediaWiki 1.5 and greater, accessible under Special:userrights. The new model allows to define groups and attribute fine-grained access control to the wiki.

The sipX-Wikis are configured to allow editing for logged-in users only. This both helps to protect from spam and makes it possible to attribute content to a user. The following settings are currently configured in LocalSettings.php:

MediaWiki has a subpage feature that allows for the creation of hierarchically structured pages. A parent page is separated from subpages with a forward slash: [[Parent/subpage]]. Subpages can have their own subpages. If the page is in a namespace where subpages are not activated, it is considered as a single page titled Page/subpage. Links to parent pages are shown automatically without any corresponding wikitext at the top of the subpage body.

I have turned on the subpage feature in namespace main in both the English and Russian sipX-Wiki.

I have just upgraded both the English and Russian sipX-Wiki to latest stable mediawiki-1.6.2.

Related links:

• English sipX-Wiki
• Russian sipX-Wiki

MediaWiki has a powerful and easy-to-use feature to categorize content. To set a category for a content page, simply add [[Category:category-term]] somewhere on the page. This will add a category section at the bottom of the page, listing all categories for that page. By clicking on one of the category links, the user is taken to the category page that lists all pages of that particular category. The first time a user clicks on a category, she is taken to an empty category page that will be populated once it is saved for the first time. To reference a category from wiki text, the following syntax can be used: [[:Category:category-term]] (note the colon in front of Category). Add text just as for any other Wiki link by adding a pipe: [[:Category:category-term|Category xyz]]. By linking a category to another category, a hierarchical list of terms can be created.