Virtual Websites with MediaWiki and LAMP

From QED

• Brief Tour of qed.princeton.edu
• Goals and Constraints
• Choices
• Synergy

Brief Tour

• Mapping Globalization
• Electronic Resources Cataloging Committee
• Index: QED:Projects

Goals

• Straightforward web-based content creation and management
  • Faculty projects
  • Student projects
  • Multiple editors per course and per project
  • Integration with database
    • access to data
    • page generation
  • Extensibility architecture
• "Isolation"
  • "Look and feel"
  • Search
• Widely used, open source "standards"
• LDAP support
• Guest logins without LDAP entanglement
• Fine-grained access control
• Distributed access control
• Extensibility
  • Extensible extensions
• "While I Live, I Grow"

See also Some Salient Requirements

Constraints

• "Open Source" software
• LAMP

Choices

• MediaWiki^wp — see QED:Rationale/Why MediaWiki
• Partitioning
  • Namespaces
  • Multiple installations
  • One or more "wiki farms"
  • One or more "QED" services

QED Access Restrictions

• Leverage MediaWiki and Apache mechanisms
  • Namespaces
  • Page protection
  • File protection
• Extensions
  • Image: namespace — © symbol in page name
  • Folder-based access
  • Category-based access

Synergy

Extensibility Framework

• MediaWiki + PHP + CSS + JavaScript
  • MediaWiki plug-ins (software extensions)
  • MediaWiki hooks (e.g. for LDAP login)
  • MediaWiki templates (e.g. for Google Earth/Google Maps)
  • MediaWiki support for adding new <tag>s
  • MediaWiki configurability

An extensible extension

Category Queries

• Special:CategoryQuery — the basic extension
• MG/Maps/CQ — "data-driven" GUI
  • "the data"

Transcluding the results of a PHP/MySQL query

• MG/Data and Analysis#Download
  • this is accomplished by "transcluding" a special page: {{Special:ExportTable}}

    the page can be transcluded anywhere else;

    the glue: http://qed.princeton.edu/extensions/SpecialExportTable_php

    the nitty gritty: http://qed.princeton.edu/extensions/ExportTable_php