I use MediaWiki for a few of my wiki web sites. I also work for the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I really like working on MediaWiki code, and contributing to extensions. It's good software (sometimes annoying, but that's hardly unusual in software; at least with open source code, one can help to improve things).
I've experimented with moving to installation from Ubuntu package, but mostly stick to running from a Git clone (including for extensions). I think that it would be wonderful to be able to manage extension retrieval and updating with Composer, but that's not a widely-held view. For some sorts of development, I also run it in Docker (for testing against other PHP versions, or old MediaWiki extensions such as WeRelate).
- Extension: MissedPages
Tool: mediawiki-feeds
A tool to get RSS and iCalendar feeds of pages in categories. See https://github.com/samwilson/mediawiki-feeds for more.
Tool: MediaWiki_Backup
A Bash script for backing up a (non-farm) MediaWiki installation. It produces backups, and also dump files suitable for uploading public wikis to the Internet Archive (to match WikiTeam archiving practices). See https://github.com/samwilson/MediaWiki_Backup for more.
Actually, it's often easier to use the following to get the XML dump:
php /var/www/mediawiki/maintenance/dumpBackup.php \ --full \ --quiet \ --wiki wiki_ident \ --server https://example.org \ --output=gzip:$BACKUPDIR/wiki-pages.xml.gz
and this to get all images (but excluding any other directories in the images/
directory):
cd /var/www/mediawiki/images tar zcvhf $BACKUPDIR/wiki-images.tgz ?
Skin: SimpleText
A overly-simple skin for MediaWiki, in use on my personal wikis. See SimpleText MediaWiki skin.
Extension: Genealogy
I maintain the Genealogy extension. It's the simplest thing I could come up with that gets around the redundant links between biographies on a family tree wiki. I'm using it on ArchivesWiki and there's a demo wiki on Toolforge.
Migrating to MediaWiki
Missing or required features:
- Bulk category changes (based on category membership, search results, galleries, etc.)
- Track 404 errors (and create redirects) ✔️ done at https://misc.samwilson.id.au/2017/404s
- Export PDFs of single pages
- Create PDF photo albums of category contents
- Mass change of template parameters (names or values)
- Wiki-to-wiki copy (wwcp)
- RSS feeds ✔️ done in #mediawiki-feeds
- iCalendar feeds
- System to manage geolocation
From Piwigo:
- Export all original-resolution files to MediaWiki-compatible names
- Export their metadata to wikitext files using the {{photo}} template
- Upload all files with mw:Manual:importTextFiles.php
From WordPress:
- Export all posts to Markdown with the Jekyll exporter
- Use Pandoc to convert to wikitext
- Upload all files with mw:Manual:importTextFiles.php
From Flickr:
- Special:FlickrImport that will import sets, groups, or lists of photo IDs or URLs.
- ↑ See also my user page on MediaWiki.org.