Having Lower-Case Page Titles in Mediawiki

Question

I am building a Mediawiki at here.

It is going OK, but now I want to have some articles to document things that begin with a lower-case letter such as Unix commands: "man", "chmod", "ls", "iPod", etc. I don't want them to show up like Mediawiki tries to make all page titles and article titles begin with an upper-case letter.

Also, I don't want the searches to be case-sensitive. I want searching for "apple" to find "Apple", etc.

I believe that I've achieved having case-insensitive searches by following the instructions from the web page.

I believe that this is good, but I am a little squeamish about what I had to do:

1. Change the Structure of the database table _pages, changing the type of the page title to be VARCHAR(255) and changing the collation sequencing to be a kind of utf-8 case-insensitive.

2. Adding a global function to globalFunctions.php.

3. Changing the php code in the wiki's skin.

It seems like this should just be a php variable in LocalSettings.php

But this all seems to work. I mean, I could enter "apple" and it would find the article on "Apple" rather than prompting me to create a new article called "apple".

But then, I noticed that the page titles were still capitalized for such things as new article such as an article on "chmod".

I went back to googling and I found a web page that said to use the Mediawiki global variable called:

$wgAllowDisplayTitle = true;

and that this would enbled me to use templates such as the following:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:chmod}}

http://www.learnbymac.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chmod

This partially works. The title of the article is now "chmod", but really, in the database the title is still "Chmod" which wouldn't be so bad, but when I go to the Category "Unix", all of the Unix commands show up starting with an upper-case letter.

I read on the Mediawiki site that beginning a page title with a lower-case letter, in any language, is disallowed.

I would like things on my wiki to be like they are on my Mac, not case-sensitive, but case-preserving.

I know that Mediawiki has to consider about every language in the world, but I don't.

I really would rather not modify the structure of my Mediawiki database any further, but maybe that's what's required. I just noticed that not only are the page titles wrong in the category pages, but they are also wrong in the title when you are editing pages.

Here's a link to a category that lists the titles in the wrong case:

---Edit---

I figured it out. I believe that it is fine now. I was missing the following line in my Mediawiki configuration file, called "LocalSettings.php:.

# disable first-letter capitalization of page names
$wgCapitalLinks = false;

I know that I entered this the first time. I believe what happened was the changes got saved in my local file system instead of being saved by my text editor, via ftp, to my website.

Answer 1

As you noted, setting $wgCapitalLinks = false; in LocalSettings.php will do the trick. If you already had pages in your wiki, you will probably want to run the maintainence script CleanupCaps as well: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:CleanupCaps.php

For your second question: To have the search case insensitive you can use the TitleKey extension (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TitleKey). It is stable, and used on many major wikis. There is also the possibility to plug in a the Lucene serach engine, if you want more control over the behaviour (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MWSearch)