Mediawiki

Hints and Tips

Purge wiki page cache

When changing templates, purge the browser & mediawiki cache. To purge the cache of a single page, add &action=purge to the URL (see [1] for more)

Increase default font size

The easiest way is to add the following to wiki common stylesheet (MediaWiki:Common.css):

/***** Increase default text size ****/
#content {font-size: 1.2em}
body.page-Main_Page #content {font-size: inherit}

The second line overrides effect of first line so that the new font size does not apply to the Main Page.

There are in fact several ways to increase the font size. Using Opera's DragonFly debug environment (Ctrl-Shift-I), it is easy to see how the font size of a normal wiki text is computed (css is filtered for property font-size):

Computed Style
    font-size: 15.36px;

Inherited from div
#bodyContent {
    font-size: 0.8em
}

Inherited from div
#content {
    font-size: larger
}

Inherited from body
body {
    font-size: 1.0em
}

Inherited from html
html {
    font-size: 1.0em
}

Note that em refers to the size of the current font, after application of all inherited styles. In the case above it means that the size of a standard wiki text is not 0.8em as given by div#bodyContent, but well 16px * 1.0 * 1.0 * 1.2 * 0.8 = 15.36px.

One can edit any CSS property above to change the default size of the wiki text. We choose to edit #content so that it only affects the wiki text part (including first header).

Keyboard shortcuts

• Reference page in wikipedia
• Page explaining how to change keyboard shortcut using user custom stylesheet.
• Most frequently-used HTML access keys (default access-key shortcut is alt+shift for Firefox and shift+Esc for Opera):

Action	Key
accesskey-edit	e
accesskey-preview	p
accesskey-save	s
accesskey-search	f

Access Restriction

See these pages for implementing access restriction in MediaWiki:

• A page that implement per-page access restriction [2].
• Another way to hide pages [3].
  • See sourceforge project.
• Yet another extension [4].
• Security problem with access restriction extension:
  • [5]
  • [6]
• Some information on how to create custom namespaces [7].

Miscellaneous

Page Special:Version

produces a complete list of all extensions installed on the wiki.

Troubleshooting

Fix templates that always produce {{{1}}}

Templates in Mediawiki will fail if the parameters contains an equal sign. Consider for instance the template nb:

<div class="noborder">
{{{1}}}</div>

Let's enclose a <source> tag:

<source lang=bash>echo Hello</source>}}

echo Hello

The fix is simply to prepend 1= to the parameter value:

1=<source lang=bash>echo Hello</source>}}

echo Hello

Tag attributes not expanded in templates

To have tag attributes expanded in wiki templates (in particular when these attributes contain template parameters), use the special construction {{#tag:tagname|content|attr1=val1|attr2=val2}}. See also #tag magic word and bugzilla 61341 for more information.

This is used in template Template:Rawfiledownloadexample:

You can download file "{{{name}}}" below, just click this link: {{#tag:file|{{{name}}}|name={{{name}}}|tag=pre}}.
{{#tag:pre|{{{content}}}}}

The example

{{Rawfiledownloadexample|name=myfile.txt|content=Once upon a time
There was a Tag
Tag was clickable
And clicked it was}}

expands into to the following with action ?action=raw&templates=expand:

You can download file "myfile.sh" below, just click this link: <file|name="myfile.sh" tag="pre">myfile.sh</file>.
<pre>Once upon a time
There was a Tag
Tag was clickable
And clicked it was</pre>

Can't upload file

Error message:

Could not create directory mwstore://local-backend/local-public/ when Uploading.

The problem is due to wrong ownership / permission in mediawiki folder [8]:

sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/mediawiki

MediaWiki for developers

References

• Manual:Tag_extensions (writing extensions that provides new wiki tags)
• Parser functions
• How do I render wikitext in my extension ?
• Manual:RequestContext

Tips

• In 99% of cases, extensions just need to use the method recursiveTagParse of the parser instead of Parser::parse (apparently this function is not re-entrant).

Add an extension stylesheet in HTML head element

The goal is to add a stylesheet <link> tag in the HTML <head> element, either ALWAYS or CONDITIONALLY, and/or STATIC link or DYNAMIC link (from page content).

<head>
  ...
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="..." />
  ...
</head>

Criteria:

• Must work with recent MW version, and use stable API.
• Must be page-caching friendly.
• If link is added conditionally, avoid parsing twice the page content. Can we use some context information?

List of relevant hooks:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Hooks/OutputPageBeforeHTML
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Hooks/BeforePageDisplay
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Hooks/ParserFirstCallInit

List of relevant extensions:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:HTML_head_extensions

list of extensions designed to modify information in the HTML <head> element

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CSS

For MW 1.16.x and above. Use hook RawPageViewBeforeOutput to sanitize CSS, and ParserFirstCallInit to add a head item with $parser->getOutput()->addHeadItem( $headItem );.

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NewPageCSS

For MW 1.16+. Use a ParserFirstCallInit hook, then add a <style> element using $wgParser->mOutput->addHeadItem when it encounters a <css> tag. Looks an excellent candidate for our stuff!

• Extension:AddScriptCss

Inserts <script> (i.e. Javascript) or <link> (i.e. CSS) code at the bottom of the page's head or within the page's body. Securely inserts arbitrary code to the page's head using <addtohead>.

For MW 1.10, 1.11. Likely too complex for our use. Insert a metatag as an HTML comment, which is then parsed again (via preg_match_all) in OutputPageBeforeHTML hook.

Troubleshooting

• $parser->getOutput()->addHeadItem( "..." ) not working on mobile device.

It works on desktop, on my tablet, but not on my smartphone. Why?

• Because mobile turns off ResourceLoader module by default [9]? And because addHeadItem is similar to adding a ResourceLoader module?
• Because addHeadItem actually takes two parameters [10]?

Possible solutions:

• Check ResourceLoader/Writing a MobileFrontend friendly ResourceLoader module.
• Install Extension:MobileApp?
• Install Extension:MobileFrontend?
• Use a addModuleStyles()($modules) instead? But what is a module recognized by the ResourceLoader?

Questions

• On Wikimedia, there is a link at the bottom to toggle between mobile / desktop view. Handy to test a site in mobile mode. How can we get it installed? By upgrading to the latest MW? or installing Mobile extension

MediaWiki for Mobile

References

• Category:Mobile
• Manual:Mobiles, tablets and responsive design
• Making MediaWiki Mobile Friendly

CSS

• To apply CSS to a mobile skin, edit MediaWiki:Mobile.css, the counterpart of MediaWiki:Common.css.

Extensions

• MediaWiki GeSHi
• MediaWiki RawFile

Administration

Delete a page permanently

This procedure allows for permanently deleting a page from the wiki database, including the whole history. After this, there will be no trace left of the content of that page, except for a trace in the delete log indicating the date when the page was deleted and the reason (if any given).

• First, as admin user, go to the page to delete.
• In the menu, select 'Delete', select and type in a reason, then click "Delete page".

From now on, the page is deleted, but history is still in the database. Deletion can be reverted by going to the delete log page (Special:Log/delete)

• On the wiki server, run the maintenance script named deleteArchivedRevisions.php. This will permanently delete the page history from the wiki db.

cd /var/lib/mediawiki/maintenance
php ./deleteArchivedRevisions.php --delete

Upload lots of file at once

Use local command importImages.php [11].

php maintenance/importImages.php --comment "Rubik's cube position, better perspective" /opt/www/daemenj/web/kiwi.noekeon.org/miki/rb png