June 20

Changing the MediaWiki Main Page

Posted by Bryan Clark
Filed under bdubya | 7 Comments

Every time I’m working with a new install of MediaWiki I have to hunt down this same information. I don’t think I’ve even installed or customized that many MediaWiki instances. The time between setting up each new wiki has allowed me to forget what the answer is and searching for this fix is really hard since lots of people are talking about the wiki Main Page in other contexts.

What you need to search for is “mainpage” on the mediawiki.org site; “mainpage” is variable key name that’s used to retrieve the value which is used for your wiki main or index page. Once you start searching for that instead of “custom Main Page” or something similar you’ll end up at the Media Wiki Help FAQ, perhaps you should just go there first every time…

Here’s the answer ยป

Going to your MediaWiki:Mainpage as a user with sysop privileges lets you change the index page your wiki will show. Now hopefully I’ll be able to search my own blog and find this answer next time, or more likely I will forget I even wrote this.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under bdubya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Changing the MediaWiki Main Page”

  1. Karsten Wade on June 20th, 2007 at 3:34 pm

    Agreed that I never remember between sessions of skinning MediaWiki, even though I did a fair job of tearing it apart a bit and reassembling it to fit another design. Compare my desparate attempts:

    https://wiki.108.redhat.com

    https://www.108.redhat.com

    Works great on my browser and OS! I just wish it was as easy and popular as WordPress for skinning. *sigh* I went through this recently for some stuff on Dreamhost, which is why I remembered that I also didn’t remember how.

  2. Karsten Wade on June 20th, 2007 at 3:36 pm

    Stupid Apache redirects …

    Try https://wiki.108.redhat.com/wiki/

    … I wonder if I can fix that myself?

  3. x on August 31st, 2007 at 1:40 am

    This helped me, thank you.

  4. ch__ on October 10th, 2007 at 8:30 am

    Great tip, thanks.

  5. Foxinni - Wordpress Designer on January 30th, 2008 at 4:06 am

    Hi, Thanks for the help.

    This is what they say must be done:

    How do I change the main page?

    By default, MediaWiki looks for a page with the title Main Page and serves this as the default page. This can be changed by altering the contents of MediaWiki:Mainpage to point to a different title. If this does not change the ‘Main Page’ link included on the sidebar at install time, edit MediaWiki:Sidebar.”

  6. Richard Carter on March 5th, 2010 at 6:32 am

    Thanks Bryan, like you I always have to look up how to do this! Most helpful

  7. Anni on May 4th, 2010 at 6:32 pm

    I search for “mediawiki custom Main page” and your post is the first in the result. It helps alot. Thanx.

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