I can’t remember exactly what the inspiration was but I realized that the astronomy articles I wanted to create would be better served on a wiki. I had original planned to write articles in HTML and also add a printable PDF version. However, I realized the wiki options would give me a way to start an article and add to in the future whenever I had new information to add.
I did some searching for wiki software and found MediaWiki. I didn’t know that MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia. So, that made the choice easy.
I read through the installation instructions and there is the general series of steps to install MediaWiki.
- Download software
- Extract software – I needed to also download 7-Zip since the files are compressed in .tar.gz file and I use Windows.
- Upload to web server – They recommend creating a folder named “w” on your web server for the software. I created the “w” folder in the root folder.
- Create database – I then created a MySQL database.
- Run installation script – Browse to the web page /w/index.php to start the installation script. The installation script has steps to enter the database information.
- Short URL – By default, the URL is long with different parameters. The LocalSettings.php file can be modified to using a short URL that becomes /wiki/Page Title.
- Logo – The last initial installation step was to upload a JPG to be the logo.