deploying MediaWiki the easy way with new Ubuntu based live CD

[LirazSiri]

Hi guys,

I am one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free. Our motto is "everything that can be easy, should be easy!".

We recently released TurnKey MediaWiki, an easy-to-use, lightweight, installable live CD of MediaWiki that can run on real hardware in addition to most types of virtual machines. It is designed to provide users with a pre-integrated, turn-key operating system environment that is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to run MediaWiki with maximum usability, efficiency, and security.

I'm announcing it here so you guys can try it out, give us some feedback and spread the word.

Features

• Mac OS X themed web management interface
• configuration and installation console (written from scratch in Python)
• automatically updated on a daily basis with latest security patches
• based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy LTS

Screenshots






More screenshots...

[Skizzerz]

One recommendation I have would be to have some certain extensions pre-installed and other options changed from their MediaWiki defaults so that it works even more "out-of-the-box"

For example, by having the ParserFunctions extension pre-installed and having $wgUseTidy set to true before the user opens anything for configuration would help people who copy templates and other things from Wikipedia, which relies on both of the aforementioned items to work.

Other extensions that might be worth having pre-installed are:

• CategoryTree -- Provides a structure to more easily browse a wiki's categories
• Renameuser -- Allows bureaucrats to rename users
• UniversalEditButton (was replaced by a core feature in 1.14) -- Adds support for the Universal Edit Button addon for Firefox
• Configure -- Provides a web user interface for changing wiki configuration
• FCKeditor (IF you manage to get it to work) -- Provides a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing interface to help ease the wiki markup learning curve

These are just suggestions, but imo these extensions would help the user run mediawiki right out-of-the-box a bit better.

[LirazSiri]

Thanks for the feedback.

You make a good point, and these kind of extra integrations will be something that we are definitely going to look into for future releases of TurnKey MediaWiki.

If anybody has more ideas on what further integrations/extensions users would want out-of-the-box, please by all means - share!