Using MediaWiki for organizing your personal website
How can I insert images?
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 upload images and other files into mediawiki in your own wiki website, they tell you to insert in php.ini:
file_uploads = On
The documentation doesn't tell you where php.ini is, tho, so that's useless advice. From the site, https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/introduction-to-the-php-configuration-file-phpini--cms-34452, I found you can create a script file with three lines of commands in it, upload that to your wiki installation. run it from your browser, and that will give you some information that is supposed to be helpful but isn't. My file ran fine, but it said the file was in the path /etc/php72, which means it is on a directory I am not allowed to write on given that I use a dreamhosters.org server. So, in the end, I just can't enable wikimedia to do uploads, I think.
To Have External Links open in a new window:
Add the following to the LocalSettings.php file in the main mediawiki directory you have created: $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?
$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 -->
How can I add to the editing menu so I can do quotations and make quotations be indented with a smaller font?
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
Put
{{Quotation| }} at the end of each page, so you can easily cut and paste it to insert a quotation.
