Using MediaWiki for organizing your personal website
Contents
- 1 How can I insert images?
- 2 To Have External Links open in a new window:
- 3 How can I indent paragraphs?
- 4 How can I insert a divider line?
- 5 How can I stop viewers from editing my pages?
- 6 How can I put in a comment?
- 7 How can I add to the editing menu so I can do quotations and make quotations be indented with a smaller font?'
- 8 How do I make a quotation indented and in a smaller font?
- 9 How do I make a backup of my wiki?
How can I insert images?
In localsettings.php, which is in your main mediawiki directory, add at the end the command:
$wgEnableUploads = true;
OR--much more awkward--- insert $wgRawHtml = true; into the file LocalSettings.php in your main MediaWiki directory and the wiki will allow you to insert raw unchecked HTML. However, you must embed your html within start-html and end-html tags like this:
<html> <img src= "http://rasmusen.org/EricRasmusen2007.jpg" height= 120 align= left> </html>
You can then use the HTML tags for images to insert images that are already uploaded on the web somewhere.
To Have External Links open in a new window:
In localsettings.php, which is in your main mediawiki directory, add at the end the command:
< pre>$wgExternalLinkTarget = '_blank';
I asked about this at hte help desk as to how to open internal wiki pages in new windows by default.
How can I indent paragraphs?
Create a new page in your wiki called MediaWiki:Common.css. On my wiki, its address is
https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css
That page should consist of the CSS HTML command
P { text-indent: 2em }
Put Mediawiki:common.css on your main page, or wherever you want to use for your administrator page so you can easily find it again.
How can I insert a divider line?
Use 4 dashes.
How can I stop viewers from editing my pages?
In localsettings.php, which is in your main mediawiki directory, add at the end these commands:
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false; #anonymous users cannot edit $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false; #no new self-registered users
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Restrict_account_creation
How can I put in a comment?
<!-- This is a comment -->
Use a "template" for this. A template is a file like Template:Quotation that is a page on your wiki. Once you create a page that starts "Template:xxxx", whenever a page on your wiki has the command Template:Xxx, the phrase "here is some text" will be formatted according to whatever commands are on the Template:xxxx page.
and
for multipline preformatted text.
http://tmbw.net/wiki/Basic_Wiki_Formatting
How do I make a quotation indented and in a smaller font?
Put
{{Quotation| }} at the end of each page, so you can easily cut and paste it to insert a quotation.
How do I make a backup of my wiki?
DumpBackup.php will back up the pages in xml, without the edit histories. etc. I have not tried using it yet. Use WINSCP or another ftp program to go to rasmusen.dreamhosters.com and open a shell from COMMANDS tab menu, Open Terminal. Then issue the Unix commands to create a dump.xml file. First: cd rasmapedia3. Second, cd maintenance. Third, php dumpBackup.php --full > dump.xml. That creates dump.xml in that folder. It seemed to work for me. 33pages for rasmapedia3. Use importDump.php somehow to restore it. But dump.xml is a plain text file, and I can see the info is there.
