Mediawiki Extensions

The site wikis currently run on Mediawiki, the wiki engine used for Wikipedia. There is broad community support for Mediawiki, including a robust ecosystem of third-party addons. The following is the general procedure for adding third-party modules to MediaWiki sites. Note that this may vary for individual modules.

  1. Download the extension source to your computer and copy it over to the wiki's Extensions directory. For example, assuming we're adding the ConfirmAccount extension:
    1. Go to ConfirmAccount's download page and download the tarball.
    2. Copy it to the aclwiki's Extensions folder: scp wikimedia-mediawiki-extensions-ConfirmAccount-d8632fb.tar.gz acl:~/aclwiki/Extensions
  2. Log in to the webhost via ssh
  3. Navigate to the wiki's Extensions directory. For example, in the case of the main wiki:
    1. cd aclwiki/Extensions
  4. Unarchive the tarball: tar -xzf wikimedia-mediawiki-extensions-ConfirmAccount-d8632fb.tar.gz
  5. Move up to the parent directory and add the extension to LocalSettings.php. Instructions for this will be extension-specific, but usually it's a simple matter of adding the following line:
    1. require_once("$IP/extensions/ConfirmAccount/ConfirmAccount.php");
  6. Run maintenance/update.php from the command line:
    1. php maintenance/update.php