[fr]
J'ai installé MediaWiki pour récussiter le moribond SpiroLattic, tombé sous les coups du wiki-spam. Voici la solution à un problème que j'ai rencontré durant l'installation (dû au fait que j'utilise MySQL 4.1.x avec UTF-8), et aussi une description de la façon dont est faite la localisation par utilisateur de l'interface. Très intéressant!
[en]
I recently managed to install MediaWiki to replace PhpWiki for SpiroLattic, which I took offline some time ago because the only activity it had become home to was the promotion of various ringtone, viagra, and poker sites.
MediaWiki is the wiki engine behind Wikipedia. It is PHP/MySQL (good for me, maybe not for the server) and has a strong multilingual community.
I bumped into one small problem installing MediaWiki 1.4: the install aborted while creating the tables. Unfortunately, I don’t have the error message anymore, but it was very close to the one given for this bug.
If I understood correctly, when you’re running MySQL 4.1.x in UTF-8, the index key becomes too big, and MySQL balks. The solution is to edit maintenance/tables.sql and to change the length of the index key MySQL was complaining about. In my case, the guilty part of the query was KEY cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey(128)) — I replaced 128 by 50 and it went fine. (Don’t forget to clean out the partially built database before reloading the install page — like that you don’t have to fill it all in again.)
MediaWiki allows each user to choose his or her language of choice for the interface. That is absolutely great, particularly for a multilingual wiki! Even better than that, they let users tweak the interface translation strings directly on the wiki.
There is a page named “Special:Allmessages” which lists all the localized strings. If you’re not happy with one of the translations, just click on the string, and the wiki will create a new blank page where you can enter your translation for it, which will override the initial translation. How cool is that?
Something like that for WordPress would be great, in my opinion!
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One Comment
Thanks for writing this! I thought I was the only one having this problem. Although I came to the same solution of changing the key size, I wasn’t sure if that was the best solution. But now I feel better already.
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[...] Well, first, the wiki never reached critical mass, so contributions slowly dwindled away. Then, spam. Some of the pages on the wiki were very popular and became the target of ugly spambots. At some point, I got tired of cleaning up all the spam and decided to pull the site down and install another engine. Which I did. It just took time. [...]