Installing Mediawiki on Windows (Simple Guide)

Let us say that you want to install a wiki on your home computer/server for personal reasons and it is running windows... The following cheat sheet will help you get a mediawiki installed.

1) Get XAMPP Lite from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
2) Unzip it into C: directory
3) Unzip media wiki into C:
4) Now under C:/xampplite/htdocs, copy the mediawiki directory and rename it to something that you want the wiki to be called - htdocs/mywiki or htdocs/personalwiki etc.
5) Start apache,mysql using the bat scripts under c:/xampp-lite.
6) http://localhost/mywiki or http://localhost/personalwiki (or any other wiki name you have given).
7) Configure your mediawiki.
8) Move the LocalSettings.php file one level up in the folder structure.

DONE!

Troubleshooting

"Could not find a suitable database driver! * For MySQL, compile PHP using --with-mysql, or install the mysql.so module"

- You are trying to do the regular mediawiki install. Try the xampp way.

"Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_NAMESPACE, expecting T_STRING"

- PHP 5.3 issue. Use PHP 5.2 until there is a mediawiki fix for this.

Failed opening required includes/WebStart.php

- Check the case of the file names transferred. Some free commercial ftp agent had converted mixed case file names during transfer all to lower case. FileZilla maintains the case of the files during transfer.


Reference:
Customizing MediaWiki
Adsense With MediaWiki