Every one would be familiar with Wikipedia, ever wondered about its architecture ?? Don’t bother!!! lets experts worry about it :), But For your Information, Mediawiki is open source wiki framework which will help us to create our own Wikipedia website in simple steps. PHP and MySQL are the basic requirement, if both of these are available in your server then we are ready for our Wikipedia website.

Recently i got a interesting task of upgrading Mediawiki website which was running on primitive version. So this article is all about upgrading Mediawiki website to latest version in quick easy steps. I struggled a lot in finding best, quick solution for this upgrade and when i figured it out, thought of sharing it with you all.

Let me explain the steps,

  1. Take backup of your current Mediawiki source files and database in SQL file format.
  2. Create a new database using backup SQL script which we took in Step 1. We can skip this Step if we are planning to use the same database. In my case i have to migrate everything to a new server, so i  have created a new database with backup file.
  3. Now remove all your files in main web directory(www) in our application server.
  4. Setup Mediawiki using  server provider(Mine is Hostgator) or download it from Mediawiki website & extract the files to your main directory.
  5. Follow the normal installation procedure, its pretty simple & direct.
  6. Now browse your main directory and rename LocalSettings.php to LocalSettings.php-BCK.
  7. Access your website again, we will get a screen as below,
    mediawiki-step1
  8. Now click on set up the wiki link, follow the screen instruction.
  9. Select your language and click Continue.
    mediawiki-step2
  10. This step is really important for us.
    1. Input your database name that was created in Step2
    2. Table prefix  name if any. For eg. if mwiki_user is your table name, then mwiki_ is our table prefix.
    3. Database username & password for accessing your database.
    4. Click Continue button.
      mediawiki-step3
  11. Now we will see the following message from Mediawiki, “There are MediaWiki tables in this database. To upgrade them to MediaWiki 1.20.0, click Continue.”. Now click Continue.
    mediawiki-step4
  12. Now we have successfully upgraded our website to latest Mediawiki version. Existing tables will be upgraded and new tables specific to the latest version will be created, we can see upgraded details in the box below.mediawiki-step5
  13. Now we can rename our LocalSettings.php-BCK to LocalSettings.php which was created in Step 6 or Create  a new LocalSettings.php file by clicking the Regenerate LocalSettings.php button as above, that is also straight forward steps.
  14. Now edit your LocalSettings.php file by adding our required Extensions or any special settings.
  15. Upload your images files from our backup in Step1 to images folder and Extension folders to extensions folder.
  16. That’s all folks, our website is upgraded to latest Mediawiki version.

Please leave your valuable feedback  if this article is helpful and if you think you can add your valuable thoughts please do.