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Installing WikiMindMap to work with your own wiki

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nyfelix edited this page Feb 20, 2012 · 7 revisions

Written by John Moorhouse

WikiMindMap can be installed to display data from your own installation of mediawiki, in this step by step guide the wiki and WikiMindMap have been installed on a default Ubuntu Server based LAMP server, and the wiki and WikiMindMap have been installed in the default Apache server using /var/www/ as the document root for the web server.

As we are running other resources on this server as well as the wiki, the wiki has been installed to

http://servername.domain/wiki/

and the mind map has been installed in

http://servername.domain/mindmap

The WikiMindMap software does not have to be in any specific location relative to the wiki, and indeed can be installed on a completely separate server, one install of WikiMindMap can display data from multiple wiki’s

Download and installation

The WikiMindMap software was downloaded from git as a zip file [ https://github.com/nyfelix/wikimindmap ] and up-zipped on the server, although you can do this on your PC and then upload it to webserver via FTP. The software is in to main folders:

  1. Actionscript - this contains the source code for the mindmap browser and is not needed for WikiMindMap to work.
  2. Public - this contains the WikiMindMap installation files:
     /public/viewmap.php       :This generates the map webpage - needs editing - can be renamed
     /public/inc/config.inc.php : Config file for accessing Wikis - needs editing
     /public/getpages.php      : This is the core of WikiMindMap
     /public/visorFreemind.swf : The binary of the flash browser 
     /public/js/flashobject.js  : Needed by the flash browser
     /public/getfreemind.php   : This allows the mindmap to be downloaded

There are additionally some image and CSS files used when rendering viewmap.php

Setting up the files

There are four main PHP files

1. viewmap.php - Needs Editing

viewmap.php generates the web page containing the mindmap browser and you will need to edit this script so that the server name for the wiki that you want to map appears in the dropdown list for the selection box. This script also renders the flash browser, using data fed to it by getpages.php viewmap.php submits three variables to getpages.php

  • $wiki - the server part of the URL, in my case this is the IP address of the test server 192.168.0.18, for the english wikipedia it is en.wikipedia.org etc.
  • $topic - the topic / article name entered in the search box. (‘Mind map’ in my example)
  • $rootName - This is the name of the this script file, allows the file to be renamed. Note - This file can be renamed as need, for example to index.php, without effecting the functioning of WikiMindMap.

2. getpages.php

This is the main script that accesses the wiki and parses the links, it then hands the data onto the flash browser for display.

3. getfreemind.php

getfreemind.php can be accessed from the viewmap.php page by clicking on the [Download this mindmap as Freemind file] link. It downloads the data from your mind map in a .mm file that can be opened by the open-source FreeMind desktop tool

4. config.inc.php (in subfolder /inc) - Needs Editing

For each wiki you want to generate mind maps for you will need enter two variables, $index_path and $access_path within config.inc.php

Mediawiki by default runs user friendly URL’s so that for example, the full URL of

http://server_name/wiki/index.php/index.php?title=Mind_map

can be displayed as

http://server_name/wiki/index.php/Mind_map

or even as

http://server_name/wiki/Mind_map

$index_path

This variable is used by getpages.php when it queries the wiki to return a ‘raw’ copy of the page, i.e. the pure wiki text, without any html codes so that it can strip out everything and just leave all the links and sections. To do this getpages.php need to know the part in the full URL between the server_name and the index.php page, this will just be the folder route you created, from your web root, when you installed mediawiki.

For my installation $index_path was simply /wiki as I only added on folder level below the site root. It will be used with the variables $wiki and $topic to build the $url using

$url = 'http://'.$wiki.$index_path.'/index.php?title='.$topic.'&action=raw';

with my data it gives us

$url = http://192.168.0.18/wiki/index.php?title=Mind_map&action=raw

(&action=raw on the end returns the raw wiki text, rather than rendered html)

$access_path

This variable is used by WikiMindMap when you click on the page link in the mindmap to open the relevant mediawiki page in a new window.

The simplest way to to work out what it should be is to open your mediawiki site and navigate to a page (don’t use the URL for the home page for this), my install for example shows a URL of http://192.168.0.18/wiki/index.php/Mind_map

We can ignore the http://192.168.0.18 part and the /Mind_map as these are $wiki and $topic, so we want the bit between; for my installation then $access_path was /wiki/index.php

It will be used with the variables $wiki and $topic to build the $wikilink

$wikilink = 'http://'.$wiki.$access_path.'/'.$topic;

becoming with my data

$wikilink = http://192.168.0.18/wiki/index.php/Mind_map

$index_path and $access_path are set in the switch statement starting at the beginning of config_inc.php, you will need to create a new case ---> break section for each mediawiki installation you want to generate mindmaps for, the default section at the bottom will be applied if none of the case sections match the selected installation, and these are the correct settings for the wikipedia sites.

switch ($wiki) {
    case "192.168.0.18":
      $index_path = "/wiki";
      $access_path = "/wiki/index.php";
      break;
    default:
      $index_path = "/w";
      $access_path = "/wiki";
      break;
  }

Installation / Troubleshooting Steps

The default installation of WikiMindMap should work automatically, provided all the LAMP perquisites and PHP components are installed on your server, we would recommend that you should:

  1. Upload the WikiMindMap to your webserver
  2. At this stage do not make any changes to the php files.
  3. Browse to http://your_server_name_or_ip/WikiMindMap_path/viewmap.php
  4. Select one of the wikipedia sites from the drop down, enter a search term, and click on [search].
  5. The WikiMindMap should work against wikipedia as downloaded, if it does not, then you should review your apache / webserver logs to see what errors have been generated (in my case curl was not installed)
  6. Once you have WikiMindMap working with wikipedia, use the information above to edit (1) viewmap.php and (2) config.inc.php so that WikiMindMap will now access your own wiki.
  7. Once the system is working correctly, you can now if you wish to, rename viewmap.php, for example to index.php, if this is better for your website.

Using these steps will allow you be able to easily see if the problems you are having relate to the basic installation of WikiMindMap on your server or the configuration of $access_path and $index_path for accessing your wiki.

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