My favorite type of wiki is mediawiki,
I love the ease of use, the huge matrix of extensions available,
and the look and feel of the wiki itself.
backup, restore and upgrade support are also very important reasons to choose a specific wiki software,
and having gone through all this steps in mediawiki, I am very pleased with the ease of use.
Starting from the begining:
what is mediawiki?
MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
Media wiki site
Media wiki also saves the versions of the updated files – allowing for easy reverts and versioning of edited files.
The largest sites using medaiwiki:
Design matters
Wiki website doesn’t have to have the MediaWiki standard look,
you can design the look and feel either manually to suite the corporate guidelines or with existing skins.
Novelle’s wiki site:
marvel.wikia.com:
Extensions
Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core. Extensions are one of the main advantages of MediaWiki. They give wiki administrators and wiki end-users the ability to adapt MediaWiki to their requirements.
The extensions can add capabilities like:
- Embed videos (YouTube)
- WhosOnline – shows you who is currently logged in to your wiki
- Allow embedded flash
- Iframe – to load pages from other site in your wiki page
- Convert to pdf
- Images preview popup window
Integrate into the Organization
- Email address
- Real name
- Nickname
- Language
- A watch list – update by email when a watched page has changed.
- By default, MediaWiki’s page URLs look like /index.php?title=Your_Page,
- but an .htaccess file tweak can make them look like Wikipedia’s clean /wiki/Your_Page links.
- When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming.
First steps with editing wiki pages
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_overview
This simple editing tutorial will show you the basic step in editing a new wiki page:
- headings
- lists
- links