UABgrid Documentation

UABgrid-docs is the project page for UABgrid Documentation. This is where the infrastructure for UABgrid Documentation is supported and maintained. The primary component of uabgrid-docs at this time is MediaWiki. UABgrid Documentation is deployed on a Debian4 platform with the included MediaWiki package. At this point, the source components in this project site are mainly used to handle differences and extensions to that base.

Authentication and Authorization

The authn/z modifications for uabgrid-docs mainly consists of a fairly vanilla implementation of the MediaWiki Shibboleth extension. Relying mainly on REMOTE_USER to automatically identify users and leaving further attribute-based authorizations to later expansion.

MediaWiki Notes

MediaWiki Documentation

The best way to find answers in the mediawiki documentation is to use google. I don't find mediawiki.org documentation to have an obvious structure and have trouble looking in the manual pages for answers like, "enabling file uploads". google searches seem to work best here, and surprisingly, mediawiki pages don't turn out on top. maybe i'm not alone.

Themes

The UABgrid theme needs to be adapted to the MediaWiki skins infrastructure. See UABgridMediaWikiTheme for further details building and testing a customized MediaWiki theme for UABgrid.

Enabling Features

File Upload

File upload was enabled on UABgrid Docs as described in MediaWiki instructions. All requirements were in place except the flag to actually enable updates. That was changed with: 

patch --directory /var/lib/mediawiki1.7 LocalSettings.php << EOF
87c87
< \$wgEnableUploads              = false;
---
> \$wgEnableUploads              = true;
EOF

The max file size was increased in php: 

patch --directory /etc/php5/apache2 --backup php.ini << EOF
440c440
< post_max_size = 8M
---
> post_max_size = 30M
EOF

The web server was restarted /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The file uploads are now enabled.

The $wgFileExtensions = array( 'png', 'gif', 'jpg', 'jpeg' ); has been augmented by turning off the strict enforcement of extensions ($wgStrictFileExtensions = false;) in LocalSettings?.php.

UABgrid Docs Theming

To better understand the visual configuration options for MediaWiki so it can be customized to meet the needs of UABgrid and integrate with the general UABgrid Theme and increase the visual appeal of http://docs.uabgrid.uab.edu we need to survey others approaches to customizing the MediaWiki look.

Links on Customizing Themes

Sites that use MediaWiki