I am trying to set up a website with MediaWiki on a Shared Hosting service and am getting frustrating results. First I am going to list what I want out of my website and will show the hosting details to show you what kinds of problems I am running into here:
So the main objective of the website is to run a database of events in human history (relating to World War 2)
I want to use the Visual Editor extension to create a more visual style to edit articles (which requires Parsoid) so that editors won’t have to go through the pain of using the old wiki editor and memorizing the different characters needed for specific things and so that editing the whole thing won’t look like a complete mess.
I want to make it so that only selected accounts/people can create and edit content on the site.
I want to be able to have some sort of forum so that people can ask questions and communicate with each other.
I want my site to have a certain kind of style (which I know is a skin but was wondering what's the best way to create one is. Also, do skins also come with the ability to customize the site to have certain functions? Because I have seen sites like halopedia which seems to be running on MediaWiki but have a lot of different kinds of functions and all that. )
I want to create some sort of email system for my thing (although I could just maybe use another service which would be easier)
These are pretty much the main things that I want but there are some smaller things that I can ask how to do some other time as they are not mandatory right now. Here are the details for the hosting service that I use for the website just to give you guys a better understanding of my situation here.
- I am using Bluehost as the hosting service and cPanel as the file management system
- The website is currently on a shared hosting plan and the best one that I could get without spending a lot a month.
- I used Softaculous to download MediaWiki onto my website.
One of the main things that I have been having trouble with is installing Parsoid to install the VisualEditor extension onto the site. The problem is that to install Parsoid you need Node.js which I can’t install on my hosting service because it is shared hosting. However I tried following the instructions on the page that shows you how to do it using Heroic but have been having trouble with that too.
If you wait a few weeks, MediaWiki 1.35 will be released with a PHP implementation of Parsoid.