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Using Mediawiki as personal wiki

Posted March 30th, 2006 in Misc by pankaj

I have been trying to maintain a personal wiki for taking notes for a long time. I have tried almost everything available under the sun. There were few basic but absolutely necessary requirements that I wanted from this wiki

  1. I am the only one i.e. only I would be able to read it and no one else.
  2. Someone else can not start writing to it unless I authorize
  3. Ability to change look and feel

In search of this kind of wiki I started to look around. The first stop was the software that runs the largest wiki (wikipedia) i.e. mediawiki. I liked it what I saw in version 1.3.x but it didn’t meet my requirements for a personal wiki and was more geared towards the traditional wiki at that time. Bit I liked it and ended up creating a public wiki called sarvagya for Hindi on web. After this I flirted around with BaseCamp, Jot, PmWiki, Microwiki based around wordpress, tiddlywiki, WakkaWiki etc. etc.

None seemed to fit the bill besides I was spoiled by Mediawiki’s other features and a great and active developer community. One of the things that one has to consider while using open source software is that it will be around for a while ( I will confess it is same for the enterprise software which brings bread for me) But I digress. So recently during one of the conversations with a friend he pointed that Mediawiki’s users right management has been improved a lot and now it supports all the features that you want. I checked and found this page called preventing access, here are the few lines of settings in LocalSettings.php that allowed what I wanted

$wgWhitelistRead = array( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin" );
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;

Third requirement of chaging the look and feel of the wiki is possible but still still a little more involved process and I don’t want to spend more time on this. I would have loved if it would have been similar to creating themes for WordPress.

Overall I am just happy to be able to create a small personal wiki using Mediawiki

4 Responses so far.

  1. I have created a personal wiki for myself with MediaWiki and am using the pre-made BluWiki theme… it’s a little nicer than the default Monobook. Also, the semantic mediawiki extensions and google maps extensions make it easy to store a lot of data in a searchable, sortable way like a traditional PIM might allow.

    I’m still playing around with it, but it’s working nicely so far.

  2. I am highly thankful to you,,, I cannot express by words…

    I have setup a my own wiki so that on one can edit and even see it.
    I want total personal wiki but at the same time i want some paegs that contains my poems will be readable to everybody….

    one more question that after making it totally private ,, will the google bots will be able to read the contents,, as Many sites which do not give access to some pages, but they can be accessed by google cache….

    Thanks,,,

    http://placements.techfandu.org/index.php?title=Links_and_Links

  3. vbb says:

    My solution is just to use .htaccess and .htpasswd to password-protect my wiki. I also have second wiki for public things.
    But I fear that any attack on my server could give the attacker access to database and allow him to read my private wiki. I am looking for total database encryption for mediawiki.

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