I spend some time at work figuring out how to get Media Wiki to work with the Collection Extension. The Collection Extension is a nice plugin that will allow you to export wiki pages as a PDF and create a collection of wiki pages and export them as a pdf book.
Here are some quick n dirty notes on the overall process. I will come back and provide a full guide once I put the proper notes together.
- Install Ubuntu Server (I went with the new 10.04 LTS release). Run all updates.
- Setup LAMP Stack: Apache, MySQL, PHP5, php5-mysql, php5-curl.
- Install a lot of dependencies and additional software: build-esentials, python dev tools, ect…
- Setup mwlib as described in the installation instructions. There are some dependencies there so make sure you read carefully. Use easy_install mwlib to install.
- Again, follow instructions very closely to setup mwlib.rl. You will need mwlib.rl to render pdf files if you are using a Media Wiki server inside a private network. Use easy_install mwlib.rl to install.
- Checkout the latest Collection plugin to your extensions folder. Make needed changes to your LocalSettings.php file. I noticed that for the Collections plugin to properly work some of your settings have to point to a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). IE: wiki.mydomain.com instead of 192.168.10.16.
- When you run the render server, mw-serve, you have to tell it what interface to listen to using the “-i” flag. Here is an example, “mw-serve -i 192.168.10.16″. The default interface it listens to is 0.0.0.0 so you will get an error when you try to render a pdf file from you wiki site.
This is the overall process, kind of a big general view. Again, these are just some “quick n dirty” notes. I plan on writing a more detail guide with deeper explanation of how things are setup and why I did some things that I did and I will also note where I had some problems. Hopefully someone out there will find this useful.