Dumps of the wiki?

[JBHemlock]

Hey folks,

I'm starting up a MT campaign in a setting based on, but not the same as, the standard MT universe. Right now I use the wiki pretty heavily (it's a fantastic resource!), with campaign errata in Evernote covering the differences. Needless to say, it's starting to get a little clunky.

What would be pretty ideal would be to have a private copy of the wiki where I could edit things to my heart's content for the campaign. Would it be possible to make dumps of the wiki available so that I could import them into my copy?

 

[tjoneslo]

The wiki has a Export Page to allow doing exactly that. You enter pages by name, or select a category and add all the pages, then press export. The resulting XML file has the page text and other information.

In your MediaWiki install, look for the Special:Import page to dump the pages into your wiki. If you're not using MediaWiki for your wiki, you will need to parse the XML for your wiki.

If you want all the Traveller background data, you will want to export the "Library" and "Dictionary" categories.

If you have problems with this, or other questions, let me know.

 

[JBHemlock]

Thanks, tjoneslo! It took a while, but it mostly worked. The Export Page doesn't seem to get quite everything in a large category (like Library), so I've had to spot export other categories that are supposed to be included in Library.

In case anyone else wants to do the same, here are some of the other things I've had to do:

• Set up extensions to match the ones in the Traveller Wiki's Version page - this is fairly obvious, but it is something that needs to happen to a brand-new MediaWiki installation
• The common .js and .css pages need to be grabbed manually
• Redirects and category definitions don't export with the rest, so these have to be grabbed
• I'm not sure how iframes are handled on the Traveller Wiki, but they weren't working on mine. Ultimately I set up an iframe gadget, and worked on some of the templates (Traveller Map, etc) to get them to work with this
• Files do not export this way. They'll either have to be rewritten to point to the Traveller Wiki, or the files will have to be grabbed. There's a decent quantity of them (sorry about my wget download, tjoneslo, I hadn't checked how many files would be coming down before I ran it). With tjoneslo's blessing, I can make the files available in a zipped package for anyone who wants them.

After all that, though, I have a mostly functional private replica of the Traveller Wiki! Was it more work than I imagined it would be? Yep. Was it worth it? Absolutely! The wiki is an amazing resource, and having the ability to modify it to suit my campaign just makes it that much more valuable.

 

[tjoneslo]

If you had mentioned you wanted the images (or a subset of them) I have a full backup of them and could have supplied you with a zip archive.

Ah well, note for future people, if you want a set of images (say more than 10) from the wiki, please let me know and I can get them for you in a simpler fashion.

The travellermap iframe is a js hack I had to put together when the wiki was still on Wikia. Wikia didn't allow inserting iframe elements to prevent weirdness (mostly advertising) they didn't want. So there's an auto-execute set of javascript (in common.js) that inserts the iframe into a div tag. Since it worked on the current installation, I didn't bother to change it.