Setting up Mediawiki as a Web App for your Company Knowledge Base

by Danny Kolke
published on: 09/18/08 7:09:43 AM

If you need to create collaborative content, a knowledge base or even manage project content around a team, a wiki is a great app to accomplish the task.   

Recently, I was working closely with a group and I wanted to be able to:

• Have a protected Web site for our team
• Have a Web site that was able to edit the content in real-time, so each contributor (who was authorized) could collaborate on the content
• Set up alerts so when changes were made, participants would get notified
• Use this site as the start of a larger project and
• Use this site as a protected knowledge base for internal documentation.
  

Keep in mind that our goal was not task management, but more like group brainstorming, product vision development, resource development and the end result would be a knowledge base for our team and company.

With all these considerations in mind, a wiki that is password protected best fits my needs. I have always liked using wikis, but never used one in a protected, secure environment. So I wasn't sure how easy it was going to be to do it.

Now that the Etelos Marketplace™ has MediaWiki as a Web app that can be installed on demand, I decided to take a couple minutes and see if I could figure out MediaWiki on my own. I was pleasantly surprised with my success and how easy it was to use.


Figure 1- I was able to secure my wiki and customize my style easily.

My site is password protected. And, anonymous users cannot create an account.  

Figure 2- Unlike the default settings for MediaWiki, my site doesn't allow anonymous users to create an account and log in.

To add a new user, as an Admin User (what MediaWiki calls a sysop) I go to "Special Pages" and select "Login/Create Account." I enter the information for my user and send them an email through the system for them to complete the registration.
 

Figure 3- From the "special pages" I can create accounts for users and send them emails all from MediaWiki.

I was able to customize the preferences and set email alerts the way I wanted them. My team can now collaborate and edit our new knowledge base in real-time.  

Here is what I did. With the Etelos Marketplace, I can install a new MediaWiki Web App in just a few minutes and start sharing content with my work group. All I did was add it to my cart and check out.

Then I needed to tweak the configuration file in MediaWiki to do the following:

• Protect Content from anonymous visitors
• Run always on https to make the content more secure
• Customize the reply email addresses for alerts and notifications
• Ensure that only users I specified could sign-in to add/edit content (no anonymous users)
• Set up and invite my users
• Edit my content with my group on the fly.

To do this, I went to the Etelos EDK™ link in my Getting Started instructions (which required a login provided in the instructions) and edited the LocalSettings.php file. In the MediaWiki help, I found text to copy and paste and set up my wiki the way I wanted it.

Figure 4 - Etelos EDK made it easy to edit the LocalSettings.php file in my browser and copy/paste in the changes I wanted from MediaWiki Help.

Etelos EDK made it easy to edit the LocalSettings.php file in my browser and copy/paste in the changes I wanted from MediaWiki Help (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings)

I added in the following to make sure that reply addresses in alert emails came from my email address:
     $wgEmergencyContact = "user@mycompany.com";
     $wgPasswordSender = " user@mycompany.com";

I added the following to prevent anonymous registrations:
     $wgWhitelistAccount = array ( "user" => 0, "sysop" => 1, "developer" => 1 );
     $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

I added the following to put our logo in:
     $wgLogo = 'http://www.mycompany.com/images/logo.jpg';

(btw, you can upload a logo using the Etelos EDK)

I added this to make sure that the wiki was running over HTTPS:
     $wgServer           = "https://" . $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"];
     if( $_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != 80 ) $wgServer .= ":" . $_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"];
     $wgProto = (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on') ? 'https' : 'http';

And lastly, sometimes my content edits didn't seem to show up right away, so I added the following to help minimize caching. After all, this is not for a heavily trafficked site so caching is not really necessary for the team of maybe 20-40 users I may have in there.

     $wgClockSkewFudge = "5";

All of these changes were easy; I saved my file and immediately started using MediaWiki the way I wanted to.

Logging on to the Wiki for the First Time

Logging on the first time, I needed to use the system logon provided in the Etelos Marketplace Getting Started page. After that, I was able to change my password and start customizing my new wiki.

Setting up Preferences and "Special Pages"

Once the initial configuration was completed, I wanted to change the style and other details. Most of these settings can be controlled from inside MediaWiki without copying and pasting code. You can find most of these tools from the "Special Pages" in the menu after logging on.

I can choose email settings, change my password, styles, timezones and more. The list of choices on preferences is impressive.


Figure 5- Every user can adjust their preferences after they log in.

There is a lot more that you can do with MediaWiki. Here is a list of resources to learn more about it.
     http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ
     http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings
     http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing
     http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_Page_Help/Do-It-Yourself/Formatting_Text#Text_formatting

MediaWiki and your Company Knowledge Base

I highly recommend using a wiki for your company'ss internal knowledge base. It's very powerful to be able to have employees contribute and distribute ownership of content creation, track changes, get alerts on posts and have a searchable resource for ongoing knowledge transfer and collaboration.

If you want to give it a try, just add MediaWiki to your Etelos Marketplace account and you'll be amazed at how quick you can get started.

Enjoy.

Update to post made on 10/04/2008:
To make your wiki a more practical tool for sharing files, you can change the file extensions and file types allowed to be uploaded to mediawiki by adding this to the "localsettings.php" file.

$wgFileExtensions = array('png', 'gif', 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'doc', 'xls', 'mpp', 'pdf', 'docx', 'xlsx', 'pptx', 'ppt' );