MediaWiki by default uses Wikitext (also known as Wiki markup or Wikicode), but there are Alternative parsers available as well. Wikitext is, however, by far the most common and that’s what we are going to talk about today. The most common items you might need are Section headings, italics, bold and links to other pages. We’ll review those first and then discuss some less common items. Most Common Markup Elements Section headings Headers are the “title” of a section of your page. They should be on their own line and surrounded by a number of = signs. The one you shouldn’t use is this = Main Title = because that’s… Read More
Continue ReadingWhat is DNS and Why should I care?
The letters DNS stand for Domain Name System. This is a world-wide convention that works like the phonebook of the Internet. A phone book tells you where a person or business is located. Using DNS, your web browser can find where a website is located. Every computer on the internet has an IP address. They are “ugly” things like 192.368.21.12 (older style) or even uglier like 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 (newer style). Without domain names, we would have to visit websites using their IP address. Luckily, however, those people who run the Internet provide us with DNS so we can use domain names like google.com and civihosting.com instead of numbers. What this has… Read More
Continue ReadingWYSIWYG Editors for MediaWiki
MediaWiki uses “Wikitext” which is a text-based markup language, not difficult for programmers, but for regular people it can be very confusing. There are thus 4 options for a WYSIWYG editor for MediaWiki: BlueSpice Extension:TinyMCE Extension:VisualEditor Extension:WYSIWYG By far the best is the VisualEditor extension. The main drawback of it is that it requires a third party “Parsoid” server and is quite difficult to setup. At CiviHosting, we take care of this for you however. The advantage of the others is that they do not require a special server nor a special installation procedure. The disadvantage is that they are not as powerful nor as reliable as VisualEditor.
Continue ReadingLua on CiviHosting
The Lua interpreter is available on all of our servers, and the path to it is: /usr/bin/lua Or via PHP extension. Please note that this extension works with PHP 7 only (PHP 7.1 and PHP 7.2), To enable the Lua extension, you need to add the following line to the account’s php.ini file (or in a local php.ini file): extension=lua.so
Continue ReadingMediaWiki VisualEditor and a Private Wiki
If you set a MediaWiki install with VisualEditor installed to be private, it will die on the spot. What I mean is that if you set the wiki to require a logon to even view the content (a completely private wiki) and you have VisualEditor installed, then all pages will return a 500 Server Error. The fix that we found that works most easily is the “Forwarding Cookies to Parsoid” solution here: Linking with Parsoid in private wikis which means in reality to just one line to LocalSettings.php. The comment are also helpful, to clarify the issues involved: // Forward users’ Cookie: headers to Parsoid. Required for private wikis (login… Read More
Continue ReadingNextcloud and PHP Environment Variables
Regarding these errors: The “X-XSS-Protection” HTTP header is not set to “1; mode=block”. This is a potential security or privacy risk, as it is recommended to adjust this setting accordingly. The “X-Content-Type-Options” HTTP header is not set to “nosniff”. This is a potential security or privacy risk, as it is recommended to adjust this setting accordingly. The “X-Robots-Tag” HTTP header is not set to “none”. This is a potential security or privacy risk, as it is recommended to adjust this setting accordingly. The “X-Download-Options” HTTP header is not set to “noopen”. This is a potential security or privacy risk, as it is recommended to adjust this setting accordingly. The “X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies”… Read More
Continue ReadingR.I.P. Wikispaces
Today is the last day for free and classroom wikis at Wikispaces. That means that tomorrow, literally tens of thousands of wikis with hundreds of thousands of pages and media, will all go offline permanently. Wikispaces is deleting all such wikis and not keeping any backups.
Continue ReadingMigration from Wikispaces to MediaWiki
CiviHosting is now offering migration service from Wikispaces to MediaWiki. This includes migrating correctly complicated issues that other migration services have not been able to manage. One is multiple tables on a page. Another is tables with multi-line text in a table cell. Another is media files with spaces or other non-standard characters. While these issues don’t sound terribly exciting, they are real challenges for automated migration tools and our tool works for these. Our migration services are turn-key. That means you just place your order with us and we do the rest for you. You can see more about our services here: Wikispaces Migration
Continue ReadingWikispaces to MediaWiki
We are now offering migration services from Wikispaces to MediaWiki as well! This adds a third option, in addition to our first two migration targets DokuWiki and WordPress.
Continue ReadingDomain Redirect for Wikispaces
Wikispaces is now offering a domain redirect service. To activate it, login to your Wikispaces wiki and click on the “Settings” link. Then click on “Domain Redirect” on the left side. Now before you do anything, read very carefully the text there. The most important points being: Once processed, you will be unable to switch off the redirect. and this box that you must check off: Confirm that you understand that once a redirect is active you will not have access to any data stored in Wikispaces So when you’re really 100% ready to leave Wikispaces for good, go ahead and do it.
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