:: MIS Insights ::

As my blog-readers and colleagues will know, I use WikiMedia as my Notepad. Here are two of the coolest things I’ve learned because I didn’t Read The Fancy Manual:

You can rename page titles!

Page Titles serve two notable functions:

• Title of the Page - This is the Title found at the top of the Wiki Article. duh. Sometimes, you just want to rename the page title so that it becomes more relevant to your content.
• URL Stub - Page Titles become part of the web address that leads to your Wiki Article. An article with a page title of “ATG Setup Notes” might have a local page address of http://localhost/wiki/ATG_Setup_Notes. As such, you may want to fix your Page Title so that people who don’t want to use search will have an easier time of typing or taking note of your article’s page address.

How to rename wiki articles: Use the Move tab found at the top of the page. If you can’t find it, either you don’t have permission rights, the page is protected from such actions or you haven’t logged in.

You can delete pages!

After collating and organizing some of the information I had earlier, some pages no longer became necessary. Here’s how you do it:

Prerequisite: Your account must belong to the bureaucrats and sysop (b&s) wiki user groups.

If you’re like me, you created a separate personal account from the default root account. I use my Pipboy user account to write my local articles while I use the bogart user account to administer the Wiki environment. Pipboy must belong to the b&s user groups to be able to delete pages. How do you include an account into a user group? Use your root Wiki account (in my case, it’s the bogartuser account). It’s the sysop account you created during installation.

After you login to your Wiki installation using your sysop account, go to the Special Pages section (it’s a link on the left) and look for User rights management at the bottom of the page. From there, look for your personal account and include them in the b&s user groups.

Additional (Unlikely) Prerequisite: If you’re my number one fan, you also forgot your sysop account details. No worries!!! If you know how to use MySQL (or PhpMyAdmin), then worry no more! This snippet will reset your sysop account to what you want it to:

UPDATE wikipedia_aug_2007user SET user_password = md5( concat( user_id, '-', md5( 'olats' ) ) ) WHERE user_name = 'bogart';

Where:
wikipedia_aug_2007user - wiki database
olats - new password
bogart - sysop account

If you forgot the username for the sysop account, you can browse the user table and look for the user_name column.

Once you’re done with that, log-in to the sysop account then set up your personal account as I told you earlier.

You should now have a Delete tab at the top your screen when viewing deletable pages!

Very Nice!