Development:Index

This page details information related to the development of this Mediawiki-driven website, serving as documentation for the code written for the wiki. For information regarding how to make use of this wiki's features once it's been set up, refer to Help:Index.

Extensions

• Semantic Mediawiki is used to provide:
  • Page summaries
  • Priority levels
  • Paths
  • Dependencies

• Scribunto (Lua scripting) is used to provide:
  • Article dependencies (Lua is needed to support adding an arbitrary number of dependencies to a single box)

• A Syntax Highlighting extension is used to provide syntax highlighting for code in the wiki.

• Widgets is used to provide:
  • Page demonstrations (List of widgets)

• UserDash is the extension that drives most other features specific to this site, including:
  • Special:Profile, various graphs related to a user's progress through this wiki.
  • Special:Dashboard, a page directed towards guiding a user to their next page to read.
  • The rating and page tagging system
  • Page graphs, summoned by the </pagegraph> tag (though a separate template is used to actually include the pagegraph)
  • Contents page

• A simple custom extension, ShowWidget, is used to show a widget alone, for embedding in stuff outside of MediaWiki.
  • This widget provides the special page Special:ShowWidget, which requires an argument widget={widget name} to function properly

• The skin Chameleon is used to provide a Bootstrap look to the wiki.
  • The Bootstrap extension the Chameleon skin comes with does not include tooltip.js from Bootstrap. Run the command sed -i "s/'styles' => 'tooltip',/& 'scripts' => 'tooltip.js',/" extensions/Bootstrap/src/Definition/V4ModuleDefinition.php from the Mediawiki base directory to fix this. This needs to be done every time Composer is used to update components, as this change would be overwritten.

Backup

To backup the contents of the wiki, one needs to obtain the page contents, as well as the media files.

• To obtain the page backup, run php maintenance/dumpBackup.php --current > backup.xml
• To obtain the media file backup, run the bespoke exportImage.sh script to obtain Mediafiles.zip.

backup.xml and Mediafiles.zip together comprise a full wiki content backup.

Re-installation

1. First, run git clone https://gitlab.cs.man.ac.uk/w81054ch/operating-systems-wiki-installer.git . (don't miss the . at the end!) in your MediaWiki installation directory to download the installation pack.
   • If the wiki had been edited since the last time that repository is updated, create the two backup files and overwrite the files in the cloned repository. Then, if possible, commit and push the new backups back to the repository.
2. Then, simply run ./install.sh to install the wiki, paying attention to the instructions or warnings that may appear.

The install.sh should guide you through the rest of re-installation, including automatic restoration of backups.

Further setup

For the rating chart in Special:Profile to work properly, the values UDStartYear, UDStartMonth, UDStartDay, UDStartHour, UDEndWeek and UDVacationWeeks in extensions/UserDash/extension.json must be set to sensible values.