22 June 2007

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

OD/Wikia Upgraded

The OD/Wikia file structure has been upgraded to a more maintainable structure in preparation for the new Backup & Restore extension. The new structure allows wiki domains to be added or manipulated without requiring the web-server to reload its configuration files. The new directory structure looks like this:

/var/www
/var/www/mediawiki                   -> /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0
/var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0
/var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0/extensions -> /var/www/extensions
/var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0/files      -> /var/www/files
/var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0/wiki       -> /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0

/var/www/domains
/var/www/domains/peerix.org     -> /var/www/settings/peerix
/var/www/domains/www.peerix.org -> /var/www/settings/peerix
/var/www/domains/wikifs.org     -> /var/www/settings/wikifs
/var/www/domains/www.wikifs.org -> /var/www/settings/wikifs

/var/www/files
/var/www/files/peerix
/var/www/files/peerix/images
/var/www/files/wikifs
/var/www/files/wikifs/images

/var/www/settings
/var/www/settings/peerix
/var/www/settings/wikifs

The MediaWiki source code for each version are stored in /var/www/ as before and have a standard LocalSettings.php which includes the new wikia.php extension. The wikia.php include sets up some defaults and then includes one of the specific sets of LocalSettings found in the /var/www/settings directory. It find the specific file in settings by checking if the requested domain exists in /var/www/domains, if so it is a symlink to the file in settings that should be used for the domain. Two symlinks must be added to the MediaWiki source, wiki which simply points to the same source code directory (this is so that all relative URL paths can start with /wiki which our friendly-URL's setup requires), and files which links to the directory containing all the wiki's uploaded files areas (doing it this way means that the MediaWiki source files are the root from the public side).