If you forgot your MediaWiki password, you’ll want to reset it. If you can, go to the login page and have the password sent to you, this is of course the easiest thing to do.
Sometimes though, you’re a stupid Sys Admin (read me) and you set up a wiki real quick and think “I won’t forget the password!”. You then decide not to include your email address when creating the wiki account profile. So if you’re that Sys Admin (read me) here are the instructions for retrieving that password:
log on to mysql
type the following query:
UPDATE user SET user_password = MD5(CONCAT(user_id, ‘-’, MD5(’newpassword‘))) WHERE user_id = uid
go back to the MediaWiki page and log in.
And next time don’t think you can remember a password, you can barely remember your name.
I’ve been poking around mediawiki a bit because I just set up a personal one. Some of the users of my personal wiki aren’t going to be very technologically savvy, so I thought of putting some information to help them use the wiki. I created some quick editing tips, how to login, and then I thought, “how am i going to explain what the heck this thing is?” That’s when I remembered CommonCraft‘s video, Wikis in Plain English (see below):
So I thought wouldn’t it be great to embed the Wiki’s in Plain English video into a wiki so that people can figure out what it is before beginning to use it. I found a great extension called VideoFlash that allows you to embed a number of different video types into a MediaWiki site. So I included the Wiki’s in Plain English video on my personal wiki as well.
Then I thought, “hey i can use this for my mediawiki farm at work”. We have a mediawiki farm here at Wheaton that allows multiple wikis to exist on with just one MediaWiki installation. One of my to do lists is to create a main page for the farm. I thought what could be on the main page is a form asking people to sign up for a wiki. I then thought maybe the main page could be a wiki. Users could see the video, and fill out information via a form.
So I found a very simple extension that is basically a form handler that will email the information submitted by the user to whatever email you would like, its called: FormHandler send form by Email
I’m still not sure if I’m going to go this route, but it is a possibility and maybe something that others might find interesting as well.
Basically copy and paste the code on that page into your LocalSettings.php file. I chose to stick with permissions for random users (*) and logged in users (users). You may actually have groups and what not that you want to do more with. This was simple enough to do…but it was RIDICULOUSLY hard to find this page, mostly because I kept searching for password protecting your MediaWiki. So I’m archiving it here for my own future reference.