How-to build a genealogy site like this one

Introduction to this guide

This is intended as a how-to guide to build your own wiki dedicated to Genealogy. I'm not a web developer or a programmer, just someone who has enough knowledge and googling skills to be dangerous.

This guide consists of the following:

• #Why use a wiki?
• #Wiki options
• #Web Hosting Options
• #Cost
• #why I use mediawiki
• #Installing
• #basic usage
  • #writing and formatting
• #intermediate usage
  • #templates
• #advance usage
  • #symantic mediawiki
  • #parser functions

Major Components

This site utilizes three major components behind the scenes. Not all of them are free, but all are written in PHP and may require code modification to work togeather.

• MediaWiki

Minor components come from:

• mediawiki components

Installing major components

Some hosting plans offer automatic installations of one or more of these components. While convenient, the do not always provide the flexibility needed to integrate these components. To make this work you will need to go to the official site for each component, download, extract, and manually install them on your server.

1. install Wordpress in httpdocs or whatever your default web directory is. Follow all instructions provided by Wordpress.
2. install mediawiki in its own directory. For example, a folder called /wiki. Follow all instructions provided by mediawiki. Use the database you used with Wordpress
3. install tng in its own directory. For example, a folder called /tng. Follow all instructions provided by tng. Use the same database you used with mediawiki and Wordpress.

It is very important to use the same database with all three installations.

If you installed everything correctly you will have a directory structure that looks like:

• tng
  • admin
  • css
  • (etc)
• wiki
  • bin
  • cache
  • (etc)
• wp-admin
  • (etc)
• wp-content
  • (etc)
• wp-includes
  • (etc)

Plugins, extensions and mods

Wordpress

• wikiembed
• Askimet
• BadBehavior

Mediawiki

Tng