Chapter 7. Web servers: Building a MediaWiki server
This chapter covers
- Building dynamic web servers using Apache
- Managing backend application data with SQL databases
- Identifying and resolving application package dependencies
- Installing and configuring a MediaWiki CMS
Got a small company blog to publish, or 30 years of technical and corporate data spanning 100,000 pages? You’ll need some kind of content management system (CMS). In case you’re wondering, a CMS is an application designed as a framework for the creation and administration of digital content. Popular CMS applications you might have encountered include WordPress and Joomla.
A wiki can be a particularly effective way to manage large communities of contributors. It’s a kind of CMS whose architecture is intentionally decentralized, allowing users to freely collaborate not only on the content itself, but on the larger structure of the entire data collection. A wiki engine is a platform on which wikis are built, usually using some kind of simple and intuitive markup language. MediaWiki is a popular example of an open source wiki engine, but Atlassian Confluence is a mature commercial alternative.