The Site With the Lamp

January 19, 2006

The Wiki on this site has been broken for a long long time. The pages are being displayed but they are not editable. What use is a wiki that cannot be edited by readers?

The root cause of the problem is an incompatibility of the Mediawiki (1.3.9) with PHP 4.4 . Fixes were later made available but I never got around to installing them, partly because I am running a highly customized version of Mediawiki with some of it's bloat trimmed off.

While I was procrastinating, Mediawiki gradually moved upto version 1.5.5 Now when attempting to upgrade to the latest version I see nothing but a long sequence of erros. So the strategy is to follow the time honoured tradition of upgrading one small step at a time. The first step will be to move up from 1.3.9 to 1.3.18

The docs says updating 1.3.18 should fix any issues caused by conflicts with the PHP version. It didn't happen until I switch over to 'ugly urls' (to use the mediawiki terminology). That is each is now identified uniquely by the query string in the url. Rewrites are not used.

Took the next step, upgrading to 1.4.13, there was an error message when the update.php was executed but so far it looks like this message can be ignored.

Next step of course is 1.5.5, again copied the files as before into the wiki folder and ran the update.php script. This time no error is shown, but still the wiki cannot be edited unless you are using ugly URLs.

So once again this goes into the back burner. The changes were done on my local mirror of the site with the lamp so you will not see any changes yet, the real changes will appear only after the site has been updated after applying my customizations again.