Mediawiki upload settings

By default the Mediawiki upload settings are too restrictive because they deny most filetypes. And changing the file extension is not enough because Mediawiki also checks the mime type. As a quick and dirty to allow what you want open LocalSettings.php and add:

$wgStrictFileExtensions = false;
$wgCheckFileExtensions = false;
$wgVerifyMimeType = false;

Mediawiki printing

By default mediawiki includes header and footer information, which looks unprofessional when printing. To disable this open up skins/common/commonPrint.css and add:

#footer {
display: none;
}
.printfooter {
display: none;
}
#bodyContent {
font-family: courier;
}

Mediawiki sidebar

To change the Mediawiki sidebar login as sysop and edit the page 'MediaWiki:Sidebar'. Note that the default sysop login name is WikiSysop.

Mediawiki refresh

To force Mediawiki to refresh anything it has cached just update LocalSettings.php:

> touch /var/lib/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

Mediawiki disable new accounts

For privacy I recently made my wiki (Mediawiki 1.7) private and disabled new account creations. To do this I opened LocalSettings.php and added:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;

The problem is this prevents users logging in. I finally figured out I need to make the login page an exception for anonymous users with:

$wgWhitelistRead = array("Special:Userlogin");