 | | |
| MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide: Install, manage, and customize your MediaWiki installation | 
 enlarge | Author: Mizanur Rahman
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $35.99
You Save: $4.00 (10%)
Buy New/Used from $35.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  (10 reviews)
Sales Rank: 187912
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 284
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 1904811590
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781904811596
ASIN: 1904811590
Publication Date: March 15, 2007
Release Date: March 15, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This book covers the open-source MediaWiki wiki engine from installation and getting started through structuring your collaborative website, advanced formatting, images, multimedia, security, and managing users to backing up, restoring, and migrating your installation and creating new MediWiki templates.The book has a fast-paced, friendly tutorial style and uses a fun example to teach all of MediaWiki's key features. Run your own MediaWiki collaborative website with this fast-paced, friendly tutorial, which is full of information and advice for creating powerful MediaWiki sites, and filling them with varied and useful collaborative content. Whether you are creating a public wiki for completely open contributions, a private wiki for collaborating within your work team or group of friends, or even a wiki for personal use, this book will show you all the essential steps. You will see the various ways of organizing and managing content, and preventing collaboration from getting out of control. You'll learn how to incorporate images and other media into your pages, as well as becoming a wiki markup wizard to produce intricately formatted pages with tables, lists, and more. On the technical side, the book covers how to administer users, back up and restore content safely, migrate your installation to another server or database, and even make hacks to the code. MediaWiki is the free, open-source wiki engine software that powers Wikipedia and many of the other popular wikis across the Web. Written in PHP, it possesses many features that make it the engine of choice for large collaborative wikis: flexible markup, comprehensive user management, multimedia handling, and more. - Get your MediaWiki site up fast
- Manage users, special pages, and more
- Customize and extend your MediaWiki site
- Create new, attractive MediaWiki themes
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 This is *the* book if you want to have your own mediawiki April 7, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I recommend the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" for editors of your custom mediawiki, but for administrators, this book: "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide is well worth the $40.00.
I like that this book covers so much, yet doesn't try to cover everything. I'm sure that you can find the rest of what you need for a complete reference by Googling and reading the mediawiki that supports mediawiki.
 Very Satisfied December 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am new to wikis and this was an excellent resource for me. Yes, there are a few errors here a there but I still consider it a very good reference. After this book you will be able to do more deep research on your own.
This book is based on version 1.9.0, which is clearly stated in page 20.
 really needs an editor October 18, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought this book because I'd been looking in vain for information on customizing MediaWiki, having hit the proverbial brick wall trying to get beyond the basic configuration on my team's intranet wiki. I was a bit hesitant after reading earlier reviews mentioning that this book was poorly written, but bought it anyway being the *only* book available on MediaWiki.
Given my prior (although minimal) exposure to MediaWiki, I was able to skim through the first four chapters rather quickly. The second half of the book has promising chapter titles, and does contain several code snippets & hacks, but I continually found myself wondering how a professional title made it to press with such poorly written prose. I found the explanations of key concepts to be rather circular, never clearly communicating "the big picture".
Bottom line: If you're starting from scratch, this book should get you started & help as a reference if you need some hacks later on. Otherwise I'd skip it.
Subject OK, writing awful August 19, 2007
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
I think this book sells purely because there is little in the way of alternatives. The documentation in the MediaWiki wiki itself is patchy, jumbled, and confusing to navigate. I wanted a more 'polished' reference book, and this is the only book on Amazon devoted solely to MediaWiki.
Content-wise it is _OK_. There is very little in here that isn't already available on-line, but at least it is presented in a more logical manner. The first half of the book is really aimed at contributors to MediaWiki, such as creating and editing a page, uploading and inserting images, and creating tables. True, Administrators will also need to know this, but it's probably safe to assume that anyone purchasing an "Administrator's Guide" already knows this. Certainly, it didn't teach me anything new. The second half gets more useful, covering administration of access rights, creation of skins, managing namespaces, and so on. That said, it does include huge swathes of code, which take up a fair bit of room - if you don't want to add the 'page rating' the author provides, then it's just a waste of space.
The book is also missing some key information. There's a section on thumbnailing images, but the book neglects to mention that the functionality to deliver this isn't included in MediaWiki and has to be installed separately. (At least in the version I installed, but as there's no information provided on the different versions of MediaWiki there's no way of knowing whether this is why...) It's also vague on some tasks, such as "Figure out how to run PHP scripts from the command line."
My biggest problem with the book is the quality of the writing. This is absolutely appalling. Maybe I'm a bit more sensitive to these things, being a Technical Writer by profession, but the amount of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes is absolutely shocking. I found almost 100 errors just whilst I was casually reading it - I'm sure there would be many more if I looked more closely. Most of these would have been detected by using a spellchecker, and many of the rest would have probably been picked up by Word's grammar checker. For the most part this is just annoying and distracting, but some, such as repeatedly misspelling the HTML HREF tag as HERF, are just unforgivable. It hardly puts ones faith in the author - if they can't get this right, what's the chance of the sample code being correct and actually working? But what is really shocking is that the book lists five editors, two reviewers and a proofreeader in the "Credits". None of these people deserve any credit whatsoever, as the quality of this book is below what I would expect from a 15-year old.
In fact, I suspect that the book was actually written by a 15 year-old. The tone used, the examples (the wiki developed throughout the book is a wiki for ghost stories...), the logic of exposition, is all very 'youthful'. It's as though some teenager with an Internet connection and a bit of time on their hands had built themselves a wiki, and then someone had remarked to his parents "Wow, little Timmy knows so much about wikis I bet he could write a book on it!".
Given the lack of competition you may want to go out and buy this book anyway. Just don't expect a detailed technical reference, and be prepared to overlook the frequent grammar and spelling errors...
Excellent resource for a mediawiki administrator August 12, 2007
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
When I started the wiki DharmaFlix.com, I had no experience in administering a wiki - just a hope and a prayer. For the vital information on wikis, which is in the details, I scoured the large amount of information available on the web, especially at the mediawiki website: http://www.mediawiki.org/. This was certainly helpful and got the site started. But I really wanted a comprehensive Bible of Wikis, that would allow me to grasp the full potentiality of this web development platform. I looked for a book to serve this need, and lo and behold, MediaWiki Administor's Tutorial Guide had just been published. Well I immediately bought it and read it cover to cover. It is very readable and I would think a current must-read for anyone desiring to found a wiki. DharmaFlix.com is flourishing very much because of this book and its author, Mizanur Rahman.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| | |