Mediawiki VMware appliances

In general I really like downloading appliances from the VMware Community website. However, when I had to provision a Wiki for the entire company I quickly moved away from the appliances you can download.

The Jumpbox appliance is wonderful if you do not need or want anything further.

The rPath appliance is a bit is a bit more functional for an enterprise deployment. There is afterall a console that can be logged into. However the built-in OS upgrade didn't work. Via the website, it just hung. Via the commandline it ended up in an inconsistent state from which it could no longer be updated. D'Oh!

In the end I rolled my own from a CentOS Linux v5.1 Virtual Machine. I installed the latest MySQL, Apache, PHP (& loads of php libraries) and Mediawiki v1.12.0 - much further on than the v1.6.x version that the rPath appliance provided.

Part of the power and frustration of Mediawiki is the ability to extend the functionality using extensions.

I added a number of extensions to the instalation:

• Ldap Authentication (to the company MS 2003 AD)
• ImageMap
• WhosOnline
• etc

However, I battled the Ldap Authentication extension for most of a day and the ImageMap extension for most of an afternoon. The slightest mistake in the LocalSettings.php configuration file for Mediawiki or a missing library or misspelled filename would cause everything to fall apart. In contrast, WhosOnline was a dream to install. Its special page just loads and just works. Huzzah!

Trying to make the result pretty, like the Wikipedia homepage, is a whole different story. There is still knowledge required of the dhtml, css, etc.