Help:Installation FAQ
Contents
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I set up interwiki links?
- How do I enable uploading files?
- How do I enable TeX?
- How do I make non-ugly URLs?
- How do I update from an earlier version?
- How do I change the name of the wiki?
- How do I require users log in to edit?
The install stops with no messages or I get a blank page!
Installation problems are sometimes weird and hard to diagnose. If possible, check PHP's error log (you may have to configure PHP to enable error logging) and report any error messages you have and the complete output from the installation script to mediawiki-l, we'll see if we can hash it out.
If you can track down the problem specifically, please report it directly to http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/
Known issues
- Version 1.3.3: you'll get a blank page after submitting configuration info on your config/index.php script if you don't make the config directory writeable.
- Version 1.3.x: bugzilla:736
How do I change the items in the sidebar?
The 'Community Portal' link can be set to whatever you like through editing "MediaWiki:Portal" and "MediaWiki:Portal-url".
If you want to make major changes, you'll have to edit the skin code or (for Monobook) templates/xhtml_skin.pt.
I want my wiki to appear in a frame as part of my site, but it keeps popping out of the frame
MediaWiki contains protection against abusive use of frame sets. Unfortunately this will trap your intentional frames as well -- to remove this, edit stylesheets/wikibits.js and remove these lines:
// Un-trap us from framesets if( window.top != window ) window.top.location = window.location;
How do I change messages of the user interface?
The user interface text is put into pages in the special MediaWiki namespace. When logged in as a sysop, you can edit those pages to immediately change the output of the wiki.
Some configuration changes (like changing $wgSitename to set the wiki's name) don't affect the pages which were generated at install time. You can edit them directly, or use the 'rebuildMessages.php' script in the maintenance directory (It must be run from the command line and you must set up an AdminSettings.php file). See MediaWiki localization
