MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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A collection of 125 articles

Unlocking Advanced Search Capabilities with CirrusSearch in MediaWiki

What CirrusSearch Brings to MediaWiki When you spin up a MediaWiki installation, the default search feels a bit like using a paper‑clip to pry open a steel door. It works, but you quickly realize it’s not built for the kind of precision you’d expect from a modern

Understanding MediaWiki's Hook System for Extension Development

Understanding MediaWiki’s Hook System for Extension Development When you first peek at MediaWiki’s source you’ll notice a curious pattern: scattered Hooks::run calls, each paired with a string like ArticleSaveComplete or UserLoginComplete. Those are the beating heart of the extension ecosystem. In plain English, a “hook” is

Advanced Search with CirrusSearch Extension in MediaWiki

What is CirrusSearch? If you’ve ever tried to hunt for a specific phrase on a wiki with a gazillion pages, you know the built‑in search can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. CirrusSearch changes that story. It hooks MediaWiki up to Elasticsearch (soon OpenSearch) and

How to Protect MediaWiki Against Brute-Force Logins with Fail2Ban

Why Brute‑Force Protection Matters for MediaWiki MediaWiki powers thousands of public wikis, from community projects to corporate knowledge bases. A public login form is an obvious target for credential‑spraying and dictionary attacks. Even if you enforce strong passwords, an attacker can still lock out legitimate users or overload

Automating MediaWiki Maintenance Tasks with Cron Jobs and Scripts

Why automate MediaWiki upkeep? Running a wiki is like keeping a garden alive – you water the plants, pull the weeds, and occasionally trim the hedges. If you wait for a weekend binge‑watch session to pop up on the calendar and then scramble to run updateSpecialPages.php or a rebuildData.

Improving MediaWiki Performance Through Advanced Cache Strategies

Why “just another tweak” never cuts it for MediaWiki Ever opened a wiki page and felt the load bar crawl like a snail on a rainy day? You’re not alone. The thing about MediaWiki is that it stacks layers of caching like a lasagna – if one layer is soggy,

Mastering MediaWiki API for Custom Applications

Why the MediaWiki API Matters for Your Project Ever stared at a wiki page and thought, “There’s got to be a better way to pull this data into my own app?” You’re not alone. The MediaWiki Action API is the hidden doorway that lets you treat a wiki

Common Issues Users Face When Using MediaWiki

The Reality Behind the Wiki

Mastering MediaWiki API for Automated Content Management

Picture this: you’ve just finished a massive data dump from a legacy system, and you need to push thousands of rows into a wiki

Leveraging MediaWiki's Parser Functions for Advanced Templating

Why parser functions matter in modern MediaWiki templating When you first encounter MediaWiki’s templating it feels a bit like opening a toolbox where most of the tools are hidden behind curly braces. You can get a simple infobox up and running with a handful of parameters, but as soon