Mediawiki setup

I have two vimwiki directories, one private and one public. I want to share the public one with the players in my campaign.

In the past I've run a Mediawiki site. I'll do that again. Mediawiki is mature software. I'm trusting that enough other people (including those who run Wikipedia) are running and testing Mediawiki that any security holes will be discovered and found pretty quickly. Hopefully.

I captured a record of the setup steps for my campaign mediawiki site.

Summary of mediawiki setup steps

1. Subscribe to the mediawiki-announce mailing list and stay up to date.
2. Create a development environment
3. Apply all the security stuff.
4. Put in the mod_rewrite stuff and use short URLs.
5. Add a logo.
6. Set up email.
7. Disable anonymous page view.

Details

Subscribe to the mediawiki-announce mailing list and stay up to date

Announcements of updated versions plug security holes. This is just good sense. Best practices for running your own site involve keep it clean and secure.

Create a development environment

I used XAMPP to test everything locally, first. Once it passed in the development environment I put the same feature out on the Internet.

Apply all the security stuff

Running a mediawiki site means having the best security settings for the host, the apache server running on the host, the PHP installation executing the mediawiki content and the mediawiki site.

My intent is to follow best practices for the security settings.

Put in the mod_rewrite stuff and use short URLs

It's personal preference, but I prefer the URL to say webserver/wiki/Main_Page in place of webserver/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.

Mediawiki provides guidelines on using short URLs

Add a logo

A consistent logo ties together content.

• create logo
• upload logo
• edit LocalSettings.php to reference logo

Mediawiki provides guidelines on using logo

Set up email

Other people will be editing and adding content on the wiki (ideally). They'll have questions and concerns. Configure the mediawiki site to contact you with those questions and concerns, and to email help to your contributors.

Disable anonymous page view

This is personal preference more than anything else. Mediawiki comes with a search function, so it's not like I need Google to index the entire site.

Several pages still need to be whitelisted for anonymous access, including "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin" and "Help:Contents"