Answer My Searches

The MediaWiki Installation Guide is very friendly and easy to use. Just follow that and it will walk you through the whole installation …. unless you hit one of my issues below:

Things to Consider:

Check what version of PHP your server/ISP runs. If it’s below 5.0 and you can’t upgrade to 5.0 then get the latest 1.6.x version of MediaWiki since PHP 4.x is not supported from version 1.7 onwards.
(When will my favorite hosting company offer PHP 5? It doesn’t look promising from this forum post:

PostPosted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 4:22 pm
In their infinite wisdom, the PHP 5 developers made it impossible for PHP 4 and PHP 5 to coexist. Although this is something we’re interested in offering, we are still looking for a viable way to do so.

)

If you get this error message during installation:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: posix_isatty() in /nfsn/content/gregswiki/htdocs/includes/Database.php on line 469
What worked for me at least is to go to the file (includes/Database.php) and comment out that whole block of code:
eg this:

if( $wgCommandLineMode && $wgColorErrors && !wfIsWindows() && posix_isatty(1) ) {
	$color = 31; // bright red!
	$message = "\x1b[1;{$color}m{$message}\x1b[0m";
}

goes to:

#if( $wgCommandLineMode && $wgColorErrors && !wfIsWindows() && posix_isatty(1) ) {
#	$color = 31; // bright red!
#	$message = "\x1b[1;{$color}m{$message}\x1b[0m";
#} GP- Removed because of this crap: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: posix_isatty() in /nfsn/content/gregswiki/htdocs/includes/Database.php on line 469

I have no idea what I commented out here so as always caveat emptor!

If an installation message tells you something like:
"Move LocalSettings.php to the parent directory", for me that meant LocalSettings.pl
Why, I dunno!

After the install you'll want to go to the MediaWiki FAQ right away. I had no idea what to do next. eg Where is the create page button!

Finally Some Background:
I decided to start a personal wiki simply to track all of my tasks and any other misc. knowledge and tips I pick up. I almost went with a simple text file instead but I liked the idea that a wiki will be available from anywhere with an internet connection. I also went through the task of deciding on the best wiki engine for personal use. There are actually around 1 billion options out there. I browsed through a few and finally settled on MediaWiki because it seems to be the most well known and ironically promised the easiest installation (ironic because I just made this whole post of installation problems.).

Here is the final result if you're curious. I went ahead and locked down the site with .htaccess since it should be just for me. Don't worry though, any knowledge that gets added there will eventually make it's way over here to Answer My Searches.

[tags]WikiMedia, Wiki, Personal Wiki, WikiMedia Error, posix_isatty, PHP 4, NFS, NearlyFreeSpeech[/tags]