Customising Media Wiki
Friday 11 July 2008Having recently installed a new copy of media wiki I thought I would pass on a few tips towards customising a media wiki install…. There is nothing ground breaking here just a few handy hints.
The mediawiki namespace.
One of the features of mediawiki is that it allows you to edit internal variables through the mediawiki namespace, these are nothing fancy but allow you to edit things like: what the default (main page) is, what the sidebar menus options are, etc.
You can list all of these with the Special:Allmessages page.
Basic Access Control
Another feature we have added is to use the ldap_auth plugin we have tweaked over time which allows us to handle authentication via ldap in apache and media wiki then picks up on these session vars and creates users automatically. We have taken this one step furthur in our current setup and used variables to restrict anonymous users to no access, logged in users to read only and only let sysops edit the wiki using:
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['edit'] = true;
