This is a continuation of a guest post that I did on Faith and the Web run by Anna Belle Leiserson, a great blog. We haven’t actually met but she was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog.

In that blog, Member-Only: A Wiki in Sheep’s Clothing, I talked about the challenge of introducing any new technology to a congregation. We were successful with the Members-only site because we (finally) focussed on making it useful rather than the technology itself. This article gets into some of the tweaks that I had to do to smarten the system up for public consumption.

I covered content in the previous article. Here the issues are

• the Main Page
• Security
• Categories
• Things you need to know
• Resources

Almost like Jeopardy!

Make the Main Page Special

The Main page is the landing point for everyone coming into the members-only site. It is important to make it as attractive, informative and easy to navigate as possible. This typically means making it very non-standard from a wiki standpoint but this was crucial to helping people get oriented.

“Look What I’m Missing!” The main page was set to be accessible without logging in. This meant people could browse part of the site before they asked for an account. They were intrigued by what they saw and were highly motivated to get an account and actually use it!

Security

Security is an absolute requirement.

You can set the site up so that only members can read and edit pages. Visitors can be allowed to see a small subset of pages but they can’t edit or create accounts.

Our policy is “No Pseudonyms Allowed.” We have a “Request an Account” form that requires the first and last name, email address, phone number and a reference from the congregation. Then I manually create the new account. The system emails them with a temporary password which they have to change the first time they log in. Believe me, this is a lot less work than dealing with spam.

Establish Categories

Categories are the life blood of the wiki and you need to use them to create some structure. Categories are tags on a page that allow you to find sets of articles in the site. You can easily create pages that collect all the articles in a specific category, Help for example.

The extension (plugin) Dynamic Page Lists (DPL) allows you to create dynamic content based on combinations of categories. With DPL you can easily create lists like: New Pages, Recent Edits, Most Popular, which all figure prominently on our main page.

Things that you need to know

 but are hard to find out

• MediaWiki:Sidebar - this page controls the navigation bar to the left.
• MediaWiki:Common.css - CSS put on this page affects all the other pages.
• Templates - Just be aware that almost anything in curly brackets {{…}} is a template or magic word. The contents of a template page are substituted into that space. These are used extensively on Wikipedia. Templates make it easier to create a consistent look and feel but it also makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. Magic words are system variables like {{PAGENAME}} would be replaced by the actual page name.

Resources

• MediaWiki software
• MediaWiki Users forum Great resource for figuring out how to do things.
• Dynamic Page List Extension (careful, there are two other variants)
• Preloader - for creating boilerplate. Users hate empty pages.
• LinkedImage - optional for certain functionality in DPL
• Word2MediaWiki - Word macro for converting word docs to wiki markup language. Not great but a start.