For open source purists, however, there still is the option of switching to MariaDB. MariaDB is a binary-compatible database that has been branched off from MySQL and is a pure open-source effort. For the most part, MariaDB is compatible with MySQL and changes from new versions of MySQL are merged back to MariaDB. MariaDB does provide more features such as storage engines (Eg. the Aria storage engine – no, that is not a typo) and slow query information.

I’m in the final week of my course and have papers to hand in so you won’t see much on my blog till September 6, 2011. Rest assured that this blog will be once again burgeoning with new posts and interesting reads.

-Nitin

PS: Bryan, a MediaWiki developer, suggested that you can also modify Common.css to include something like “* { white-space: pre-line; }” (without the quotes)

If you do not have access to the php.ini file, you can define a .htaccess file in your MediaWiki directory with the directive “php_flag max_execution_time 60″ or, alternatively, edit the installation script by adding in a “set_time_limit(60);” somewhere near the top of the script.