MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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A collection of 136 articles

Integrating Citation Tools in MediaWiki for Academic Wikis

Why Your Academic Wiki Needs a Better Citation Engine Picture this: you’re juggling a semester‑long literature review, a few hundred references, and that ever‑present dread of mismatched footnotes. Suddenly, a colleague whispers, “Why not just spin up a MediaWiki and let the community handle the bibliography?” I

How to Use Page Forms Extension to Create Custom Data Entry Forms in MediaWiki

Why Page Forms? The Page Forms extension (formerly Semantic Forms) lets you turn any infobox‑style template into a user‑friendly form. It works on its own, or together with Semantic MediaWiki or Cargo for data storage and querying. With Page Forms you can let editors add, edit and query

Using Lua Modules in MediaWiki with the Scribunto Extension

Using Lua Modules in MediaWiki with the Scribunto Extension Ever stared at a wikitext page that just wouldn’t behave the way you wanted, and thought “there must be a better way”? You’re not alone. In the wild world of MediaWiki the answer often lives in the Module namespace,

How to set up a local MediaWiki instance using Docker Compose

How to set up a local MediaWiki instance using Docker Compose Running a MediaWiki wiki on your own laptop is a great way to experiment with extensions, skins, or just learn the platform. The official MediaWiki‑Docker development environment provides a ready‑made docker‑compose stack that works on Windows,

Speeding Up MediaWiki with Redis: Installation, Configuration, and Best Practices

Why add Redis to MediaWiki? MediaWiki performs many expensive operations – parsing wikitext, running extensions, and handling job queues. A fast, in‑memory key‑value store reduces database load and cuts page‑render time. Redis offers low latency, built‑in persistence options, and can serve as object cache, session store, and

How to Secure MediaWiki with SSL and HSTS

Why HTTPS matters for MediaWiki MediaWiki stores user passwords, edit tokens and personal data in clear‑text when it is accessed via HTTP. An attacker on the same network can intercept those values, hijack sessions and even rewrite page content. Enforcing HTTPS encrypts the traffic between the browser and the

Things you can do using the PageForms extension

Overview PageForms (formerly Semantic Forms) is a MediaWiki extension that lets you build HTML‑like forms for creating, editing and querying wiki pages. It works on its own, or together with Semantic MediaWiki or Cargo, and is especially handy for infobox‑style data. Core capabilities * Form‑driven page creation: define

Mastering MediaWiki Hooks: Customizing Core Behavior

Why Hooks Matter in MediaWiki Ever stumbled on a wiki that just does what you need, without you having to poke around the core files? That’s not magic – it’s hooks at work. In MediaWiki, hooks are the quiet backstage crew that let you slip in custom logic right

Best Practices for Developing Custom MediaWiki Hooks

If you’ve ever scratched your head over why a simple page‑save sometimes triggers a cascade of actions, you’ve already bumped into the world of hooks

Advanced Debugging Techniques for MediaWiki Developers

Why “just look at the error message” rarely works MediaWiki is a tangled stack of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and caching layers. A fatal PHP notice on line 42 of SpecialPage.php may actually be the downstream symptom of a missing extension hook that fires earlier in the request. In short,