Best and Cheap MediaWiki 1.26.2 Hosting

What is MediaWiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day.

A Wiki is a web application that allows users to create and edit web page content using a web browser. The term wiki also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website. Mediawiki is a wiki software package licensed under the GNU General Public License, making it free and open source software. This Mediawiki software is used to run the popular web encyclopaedia Wikipedia, besides all projects of Wikimedia, wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis.

MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation that uses PHP to process and display data stored in a database, such as MySQL.

Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily.

When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

What is New in MediaWiki 1.26.2?

MediaWiki 1.26 is the current stable MediaWiki version.

New features

Performance

• ResourceLoader now loads all scripts asynchronously. The top-queue and startup modules no longer block synchronous loading.
• ResourceLoader minification is now cached in APC memory (if available) instead of the local database.
• Caches that need purging ability now use the WANObjectCache interface. This corresponds to a new $wgMainWANCache setting, which defaults to using the $wgMainCacheType settings.
• Callers needing fast light-weight data stores use $wgMainStash to select the store type from $wgObjectCaches. The default is the local database.
• Interface message overrides in the MediaWiki namespace will now be cached in memcached and APC (if available), rather than memcached and local files.
• $wgTransactionalTimeLimit was added, which controls the request time limit for potentially slow POST requests that need to be as atomic as possible.

New hooks

• A new hook, ‘LogException’, was added to log exceptions in non-standard ways.
• Revive the ‘SpecialSearchResultsAppend’ hook which occurs after the list of search results are rendered. The initial use case is to append a “give us feedback” link beneath the search results.
• Added a new hook, ‘RejectParserCacheValue’, which allows extensions to reject an otherwise-successful parser cache lookup. The intent is to allow extensions to manage the eviction of archaïc HTML output from the cache.
• Added new hooks ‘EnhancedChangesListModifyLineData’ & ‘EnhancedChangesListModifyBlockLineData’, to modify the data used to build lines in enhanced recentchanges and watchlist.
• Added a new hook, ‘RandomPageQuery’, to allow modification of the query used by Special:Random to select random pages.

Information on ‘actual’ watchers of a page

It’s now possible to use the info action (accessible from the sidebar) to get a count of “actual watchers” of a page, in addition to the already-available count of all the users having it in their watchlist (example).

This information will make collaboration easier on your wiki, for instance by giving feedback to editors on how much their recent edits to a page were noticed by active users, or by setting reasonable expectations on how much a message on a certain talk page may be seen.

Other

• Change tags can now be hidden in the interface by disabling the associated “tag-<id>” interface message.
• The ‘:’ (colon) character is now invalid in usernames for new accounts. Existing accounts are not affected.
• The expiration of the UserID and Token login cookies ($wgExtendedLoginCookieExpiration) can be configured independently of the expiration of all other cookies ($wgCookieExpiration).
• Support for generating JPEG/PNG thumbnails from WebP images added if ImageMagick is used as image scaler ($wgUseImageMagick = true). Uploading of WebP images still disabled by default. Add $wgFileExtensions[] = ‘webp’; to LocalSettings.php to enable uploading of WebP images.

MediaWiki Features

In terms of features, Wikimedia offers the “historical” features of wikis:

• Page creation
• Page modification: it simply consists of adding/modifying or deleting content
• Creation of links between information
• Discussion: the creation of a page can generate exchanges between all contributors
• Versioning: it is possible to follow the modifications made on a wiki page (What was modified? By whom? When?)
• Rollback: it is always possible to rollback and choose the previous version of the wiki page
• Rights management: each registered user on a wiki has rights that allow him to create, modify, consult or delete wiki pages

MediaWiki supports multilingual management, various extensions and media formats, providing also options to configure the wiki appearance.

How to Choose Best and Cheap MediaWiki 1.26.2 Hosting?

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