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.

7.1. Building a LAMP server

7.2. Manually setting up an Apache web server

7.3. Installing an SQL database

7.4. Installing PHP

7.5. Installing and configuring MediaWiki

7.6. Installing the Apache web server on CentOS

Summary

Key terms

Security best practices

Command-line review

Test yourself