Math support in MediaWiki

I’ve been through this process before (for older versions of MediaWiki than the 1.18 version I’m using at the moment, and things have changed) but yesterday I found myself following instructions for enabling support for mathematical equations in MediaWiki. So that’s up-to-date on my Morpheus (private) and Sixsigma (public at jj5.net) wikis (which are based on my jjwiki project). At the moment I have four wiki projects: bkwiki and bkdevwiki for Blackbrick, pcwiki for ProgClub and jjwiki for jj5.net. I also have another wiki project that’s not presently under version control called BBS for Blackbrick. I think I’ll roll the bkwiki, bkdevwiki and BBS projects into a single project (bkwiki), and the pcwiki and jjwiki projects into a single project (jjwiki) so that I only have two MediaWiki projects to maintain (for now). But, as usual, making things simpler demands more work… not sure when I’ll get around to that.

MediaWiki templates, revisited

After spending the afternoon investigating MediaWiki templates, I’ve decided that for the most part they are more trouble than they’re worth for any of my applications. I tried to create a ‘done’ template, that took username, user initials, date and ‘done note’ parameters, but really the code to call the template was just as long as not using the template, and the template broke when the ‘done note’ included a link that included an equals sign, which is just too shoddy. I’m giving up on templates until I find I actually have a use for them where the technology solves a problem that I actually have. At the moment that’s nothing.

MediaWiki templates

Today, after a long time, I am finally ready to learn about MediaWiki templates. After having put that off for weeks since I’d first heard of them, I found that it only took about five minutes to learn just about everything there is to know about them from the MediaWiki templates documentation. I think there are a few areas of the ProgClub wiki that could do with the use of templates, might go and see to that now.