DAT Stuff
Random thoughts and observations from DAT
Archive for the month “April, 2013”
Mobile Wiki Skin
The next step in reviving my wiki was to make it accesible on my iPhone. A quick trip through Google, and I found an answer on Stack Overflow. I installed the extension and the skin, and it worked – for the most part. It did format the content nicely, but I saw the following error at the top of the page.
I haven’t done much with MediaWiki skins, but was hoping it wouldn’t be too hard to fix. So I searched my MediaWiki skins directory for the problematic function, and the following lines stood out:
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$ grep -ir initPage skins skins/Vector.php: public function initPage( OutputPage $out ) { skins/Vector.php: parent::initPage( $out ); skins/WPtouch.php: function initPage( &$out ) { skins/WPtouch.php: SkinTemplate::initPage( $out ); |
I changed WPtouch.php to make it consistent with Vector.php, and the error went away. Following is a diff of the before (top) & after:
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21,22c21,22 < function initPage( &$out ) { < SkinTemplate::initPage( $out ); --- > public function initPage( OutputPage $out ) { > parent::initPage( $out ); |
I also changed the Display_Actions flag, to enable mobile edits (among other things). It worked, but the Portrait mode needs a little tweaking:
Portrait: 
Landscape: 
It’s not pretty, but it seems to work fine in landscape mode, so I’ll leave it alone for now. If you’re on a mobile device, you can see it here: datguy.net/wiki
EDIT: I thought that there might be a newer version of the skin. The Stack Overflow answer links to a 2010 page, but the mediawiki gallery links to a 2012 update. I examined the download links and they seem to be the same.
Also, after posting my solution I got a reply from someone that had the same problem, and his solution to the “Actions” problem in portrait mode was to change the “Personal tools” text. I changed mine to “My tools” (in ./languages/messages/MessagesEn.php), and that was enough to prevent Actions from wrapping onto the second line.
It’s alive!
I recently brought my wiki back to life at wiki.datguy.net datguy.net/wiki, consolidating my old wikis onto a newly upgraded MediaWiki installation. After I went through and removed a lot of dead links, I decided it was time to work on the configuration. The first thing that had to go was the default URL structure (i.e. http://wiki.datguy.net/index.php?title=Main_Page). I was hoping to simplify it to http://wiki.datguy.net/Main_Page.
I found a page at mediawiki.org describing how to shorten the URL, but it recommended against page names in the root directory, with a link to a warning page. As much as I want to have pages directly in the root, I didn’t want to deal with the complications yet – so I picked a random letter to use as a virtual directory, resulting in http://wiki.datguy.net/w/Main_Page.
EDIT
That extra virtual directory kept bugging me, so I moved the MediaWiki installation out of wiki.datguy.net into a directory underneath datguy.net, where I could use the /wiki path. I changed the old domain to redirect to the new location — http://wiki.datguy.net/Main_Page redirects to http://datguy.net/wiki/Main_Page. However, the wiki subdomain still has the problem that they recommend against — http://wiki.datguy.net/robots.txt is redirected as if it is a regular page, and displays an error when http://datguy.net/wiki/Robots.txt is not found.