Moving from MediaWiki to SharePoint O365 - part 3

Now that you have the scripts in place, how do you make use of them?

Redirect

This one is simple. Write #REDIRECT[[pagename]] like you're used to doing it in MediaWiki. Just take care that you write it exactly as I did: in uppercase, without a space between # and REDIRECT or between REDIRECT and [[. My script is not dummy-proofed like MediaWiki is.

Math and source code

As we're making use of third party scripts (MathJax and SyntaxHighlighter), you should refer to the corresponding websites for documentation. In short, you can do the following:

Moving from MediaWiki to SharePoint O365 - part 2

After getting our tools set up and acquainting ourselves with SharePoint O365, lets take a step back and think for a moment. The objective is to migrate all wiki content from MediaWiki to SharePoint O365. We can get to our content in MediaWiki, i.e. the raw content as the user types it in, or if need be the HTML-content produced by MediaWiki (using PHP with cURL). And I've got a way to upload HTML-content into pages in SharePoint. So this doesn't sound like such a challenge after all?

Wrong.

MediaWiki has a lot of user friendly formatting syntax. Like * for bulleted and # for numbered lists. Like ==heading==. Like [[some other article]]. Or how about [some external link]. And don't forget the [[Image:something|thumb|right]]. And then there's categories. And templates. And wikitables. And if you've had a bit of fun with the extensions, there's code highlighting. And math. And lots of other stuff.
SharePoint has HTML and an editor.

Moving from MediaWiki to SharePoint O365 - templateCaller.js

This is the source code of the templateCaller script, which, as mentioned, does more than replacing templates by now.

To work, it requires to be placed in your SiteAssets/JayVee folder (create the JayVee folder), where there should also be jquery.min.js and the folders MathJax and SyntaxHighlighter with the corresponding scripts inside. Your seattle.master should be updated to load the jquery script (first) and this script (second) as explained here.
You of course need to change the vars sharePointRootURL (line 15) and sharePointSiteRootURL (line 16) to match the URLs of your site.

If there are errors in it, or things that can be done better, please let me know in the comments so I can improve it! I am not at all fluent in javascript / jQuery, nor will I pretend to be.

Moving from MediaWiki to SharePoint O365 - part 1

Some clever person at Microsoft understood the wiki hype and decided to call some component of their SharePoint platform 'wiki', never mind if it really is one or has some of the much-used functionalities of such things. They knew management would fall for it. And in my case (and yours apparently), they did. It's just another wiki right?

From the articles I've written before, you know I'm a fan of good software being used for what it's meant to do. Like MediaWiki for wikis. So if you've ended up on this page because you're being forced to move away from MediaWiki instead of towards it, let me tell you: I feel your pain. I understand your frustration. If you've never worked with SharePoint before, I understand the frustration you're about to have.
But let's not mix these feelings with the work that needs to be done. So here's some empty space where you're allowed to feel sorry for yourself:





... and done.

Now we get to work.

CoolTools - SphinxSearch

In the previous posts, we've set up a virtual machine, installed ubuntu, got the prerequisite server software ready and a basic install of MediaWiki running and reachable as your intranet wiki.
But we're not quite ready to go live. In this and the next post, we'll be installing Sphinx as your back-end search engine and doing some additional configuration work.

People will be continuously searching through your wiki for that exact bit of information they need, so it follows you'll be needing a good search functionality. The basic search included in your wiki installation is not a good search functionality.
SphinxSearch is a (stand-alone) lightning-fast indexing and searching engine. We'll install it, then give it access to the MediaWiki MySQL-database . Finally, we'll install the sphinxsearch-mediawiki-extension to feed search queries from wiki users to Sphinx and results from Sphinx to your wiki.

I realize this post is a bit extensive, but rest assured, it's worth it.

CoolTools - MediaWiki

After the installation of the free web server and other required software on the free operating system Ubuntu, which we've set up in a Virtual Machine run by the previously installed - and again, free - VirtualBox, we're now ready to install our own wiki.

The software we'll be using for that is MediaWiki:

MediaWiki is a free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now also used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis.

CoolTools - Setting up the web server

In the previous articles, we've installed our virtual machine player and set up a virtual machine with Ubuntu.
Now it's time to make our machine a real web server. The actual “web server” software is Apache HTTP server, but we’ll also be needing PHP for dynamic websites like the wiki, MySQL as the database of choice, and PHPMyAdmin as a GUI on MySQL. These are typical tools for web servers.


Start up your virtual machine, and start up a terminal window. You can do this via Dash, the uppermost button in the shortcut bar on the left of the screen of your virtual machine. In the search box, enter “terminal”. This will open a console within the GUI, like cmd would on a Windows machine. We’ll be using this terminal a lot.