Mediawiki collection extension installation

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Definition

The Mediawiki collection extension allows a user to organize personal selections of pages in a collection. Collections can be:

This page includes some centralized help links and installation tips made for our own use - Daniel K. Schneider 16:31, 4 May 2009 (UTC).

See also:

Help pages

Bugs and feature requests:

Help (can also be used for informal bug reports)

Information about the collection extension and related server-side software

Installing the whole suite requires some installation skills, but should go fairly smoothly on any Unix system and should be easy on a Debian-based Linux.

Collection extension installation

The collection extension installs like any other Mediawiki extensions. Really easy with Mediawiki=> 1.14 (Spring 2009).

Get it from [1]

  • You then can just leave all the defaults and the PDF will be generated by PediaPress. However, if you have a slow server like this one, you also should install a local render server (read the whole rest of this page, the pediapress server will likely loose pages due to server overload ....)

I suggest changing file Collection.i18n.php and change the string. 

'coll-rendering_text' => "<p><strong>Please wait while the document is being generated.
Depending on the size of book you may have to wait 5, 10, 15 minutes or longer.
</strong></p> 
 ......"

'coll-save_collection_text'       => 'Choose a storage location for your book and enter a name:',

Finally, you should defined the following (language-dependant) templates and categories:

  • Template:Saved_book (Grab a copy from a wikipedia and modify).
  • Category:Books
  • Category:Book tool (not really needed)

mwlib installation

Not needed if you have a fast server and want to use the pediapress server. Installation notes made for Solaris.

Prerequisites

Install these if don't have them (usually you do)

  • Python => 2.5
  • Perl => 5
  • g++
  • Latex

Install Blahtexml

  • (not done so far)

Install setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg 

sh setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg

Install python imaging library (PIL) 

 python setup.py install

Install odfpy 0.7.0 (not 0.8.0) 

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

Install rec2c 

pkgadd -d re2c-0.13.5-sol10-sparc-local

Install ocaml 

pkgadd -d ocaml-3.10.2-sol10-sparc-local

Mwlib

Mwlib can be installed from a tar ball, alternatively through mercurial with easy_install.

I had to install manually, since I wanted to make some light patches to the code.

Slowing down the page pulling

Problem: One ought to able to slow down the server. mw-render has an option for reducing threads. But no parameter can be set in the mw extension or the mwserver itself. Therefore, one has to build mwlib from source. Changes made: 

mwlib/options.py

In about line 60, change the default, e.g. from 10 to 3 if your server can't cope.

Not suported (unimportant) tags
  • Added in mwlib/tagext.py around line 100 a tag to exclude:
'pageby', 'uml', 'graphwiz'
  • Note: 'uml' and 'graphwiz' could be fixed by using the cached picture instead
Setup.py problem

I removed the following lines (code looks ok and re2c is in the path, not idea why this test should be true ...) 

      if err!=0 and sys.platform!="win32":
           sys.exit("Error: please install re2c from http://re2c.org")

Then go: 

 python setup.py install

Alternative if you don't plan any changes 

easy_install mwlib && rehash

Other libraries needed by mwlib

pygments
easy_install Pygments
Fribidi - both a library and the Python bindings
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

(this is difficult to install) 

 setenv fribidi_CFLAGS "-L/usr/local/lib -I/usr/local/include"
 setenv fribidi_LIBS -lfribidi
./configure
make
make install
Ploticus

(not installed)

mwlib.rl
easy_install mwlib.rl

Alternatively from a tarball:

texvc
  • Is in your mediawiki installation
  • Compile with gmake it if not already done (needs ocaml, see above)
cd /XXX/mediawiki/math
gmake
./texvc_test
  • Add the directory to the system path

Testing

mw-render --config=http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/mediawiki/ --writer=rl --output=./flash-cs3.pdf Flash_CS3_desktop_tutorial

mw-serv

MW Serv provides a server interface for the mw-render engine and mw-zip.

Run the server

mw-serve --cache-dir=/data/mwcache/mwlibcache/ --logfile=/data/mwcache/logs/mwserve.log --mwrender-logfile=/data/mwcache/logs/mwrender.log --mwzip-logfile=/data/mwcache/logs/mwzip.log --mwpost-logfile=/data/mwcache/logs/mwpost.log --mwzip-logfile=/data/mwcache/logs/mwzip.log

An init script

Create a user, e.g. something like

useradd -u 70002 -g 16100 -s /bin/sh -d /data/mwcache mwserv

Chown the cache and log directories to this user

chown -R mwserv mwcache/

/etc/init.d script

(to do ....)

Tuning and tips

See also some changes to the source code above.

Tweaking the collection extension

Add in Localsettings.php (if not already done) the rendering engines you will support. Typing mw-render --list-writers will list the ones you installed. E.g. 

$wgCollectionFormats = array(
          'rl' => 'PDF',
          'odf' => 'ODT',
      );

Add in Localsettings.php if not already done the name and port of the server (altenatively you also could install a cgi script). 

$wgCollectionMWServeURL = "http://xxx.yyy:8899";

Extra stuff:

For the license, make sure to give the correct RAW wiki URL. Or if this doesn't work, remove the line and the user will see a URL. 

$wgLicenseURL = "http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/mediawiki/index.php?title=EduTech_Wiki:Copyrights&action=raw";

Limit to 100 articles: 

$wgCollectionMaxArticles = 100;

Tips

  • User the source extension (CodeSyntaxHighlight MediaWiki for formatting computer code. E.g. if you use XML within "pre" tags, the parser may become confused.
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