MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free web-building software developed by Wikimedia foundation and others. It is used to create the websites in php. Its main utility in Wikipedia. It is used to run all of the foundation's projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. It is written in php programming language and uses back end database.

The first version of the software was deployed to serve the needs of Wikipedia. Since then, it is deployed by many companies as content management system for internal knowledge management.

The software is optimized to correctly and efficiently handle projects of all sizes, including the largest wikis, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of hits per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has also been a major concern for developers. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki.

The software is highly customizable, with more than 700 configuration settings and more than 1800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. More than 600 automated and semi-automated bots and other tools have been developed to assist in editing MediaWiki sites.

Creating website using mediawiki:

Download the latest version of MediaWiki from the website:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

The downloaded file is tar file.

Now for the users using Unix operating system, untar the file in the document root of the system as:

# cd /var/www/html/
# tar -xvf "name of the file"

rename the folder created as you want to publish on the website as:

# mv mediawiki.1.9 wiki/

Now open the url of your machine in the browser:

www.localhost/wiki

Now first step of the installation begins on the browser and continue as directed.

It will ask for the databases and name of the sites etc. Give the appropriate name as required.

Finish the installation.

Now if you want to change the settings related to server. visit the file in :

#cat /var/www/html/wiki/LocalSettings.php

Restart the database service and Apache service and continue with the website building.