Development

So you want to become an OmegaWiki developer ...

You will need a reasonable understanding of PHP & MySQL web development, and version control with Git.

Setting up your environment

1. Install Apache
2. Install PHP 5.2.3+ with MySQL support/extension (don't forget to modify php.ini to activate the extension). Watch out: Some distributions are still using 5.1. Be sure to check! You can use this handy script: phpinfo.

   if you have "php5-suhosin" installed, you'll need to remove it since it breaks some functionalities of OmegaWiki because it limits the amount of information sent by POST, or something like that.

3. Install MySQL 5+
4. Configure MySQL to use UTF-8:
   • Edit your my.cnf configuration file
   • Under [mysqld], add the following lines:
     • character-set-server=utf8
     • default-character-set=utf8
   • Under [mysql], add the following:
     • default-character-set=utf8
   • Restart MySQL. When you run the "status" command in the MySQL client, all "characterset" settings should be set to "utf8" like this:
     • Server characterset: utf8
     • Db characterset: utf8
     • Client characterset: utf8
     • Conn. characterset: utf8
5. Install Git

Under the Ubuntu as well as under the debian GNU/linux operating systems, the following commands should install all the necessary packages:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-auth-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-intl php5-mysql mysql-client mysql-server git git-review

Installing MediaWiki and WikiLexicalData

There are two options:

• Installing from scratch
• Installing with an existing database (such as the OmegaWiki database)

Understanding the code

To understand the MySQL structure for OmegaWiki, see Help:OmegaWiki database layout

Documentation can use improvement. Help is especially needed in this department! Contact Erik (erik AT wikimedia DOT org) and he'll give you a whirlwind tour through the main things you understand.

A good place to start is the general MediaWiki documentation.

Our documentation can be found at http://doc.omegawiki.org. Note that lots of classes and functions have not yet been commented.

Committing changes

See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Tutorial#How_to_submit_a_patch

See also

• Help:Downloading the data - various dumps and other possibilities to download the data.