Developers:HowToTameMediaWiki

From WikiPathways

Because MediaWiki's documentation is very sparse and scattered it may be hard to handle sometimes. This page is intended for additional function documentation and short howto's on problems that took you a while to find a solution for. Please put them here, so we don't run into them twice.

Contents 1 Resources 2 Some useful global variables 3 Creating a link to a wiki page 4 How to control the browse page 5 Commonly editted admin pages 6 How to Restrict Special Pages

Resources

• Auto generated documentation and source code
• Database layout

Some useful global variables

• $wgSkin: the currently used skin
  • Use:
    • Get link objects
• $wgUser: the current user
  • Use:
    • Get local time/date

Creating a link to a wiki page

Use the function Skin::makeKnownLinkObj(Title $title, String $text):

• $title: the Title object of the wiki page
• $text: the text that the link should display (text between the <a> tags)

How to control the browse page

Using DynamicPageList2 (DPL):

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList2

Commonly editted admin pages

• http://www.wikipathways.org/index.php/MediaWiki:Common.css
• http://www.wikipathways.org/index.php/MediaWiki:Sidebar

How to Restrict Special Pages

• Alter /var/www/wikipathways/includes/SpecialPages.php
• Add 'block' as a third term to the array of each special page you want to restrict. This, in effect, requires 'block' permissions for users to be able to view the Special Page, or even see it lists under Special pages.