Installing a Media Wiki on Mac OS X Server (Panther)

I decided it would be cool to set up a Media Wiki (ala Wikipedia) for a project I'm involved in at work and set about installing it on my OS X Server. I tried installing version 1.8.2 only to find that the PHP it needs to run is version 5. Seeing as Panther is distributed with PHP4, I went on a long crusade to try and install the new PHP5 module into my OS X Server so I could run the new Wiki version.

My advice? Use an older version of the Wiki!

I went through hell and high water trying to install PHP5. An installer has been made to install PHP5 into standard OS X pain free. The URL is:

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/

HOWEVER, I found that it didn't install happily on my Panther Server. I tried a whole host of other methods as well, spent a good 3 hours on it and then started fuming with defeat. I went back to the Media Wiki page and found that there is actually a relatively recent version of the Media Wiki that can be install pain free on a Panther OS X Server:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.6.8.tar.gz?download

Media Wiki 1.6.8 will install happily provided you've got your Web Server & MySQL server running (and have created a database & user for the Wiki to install into).

Mac OS X Server: Apache Web Service won't start

My Panther OS X Server-running iMac (long blog to come) was working wonderfully until I started playing around with the Aliases for my one and only site. After I did this, I noticed that it seemed to randomly create additional Aliases. I next noticed that my website was unavailable in Safari so I went back to the Server Admin app and found that the Apache Web Service wasn't running! I clicked 'Start Service' and it thought about for a moment and then simply brought up the 'Start Service' button again. I couldn't get my web server to run and I was starting to get a bit peeved. I rummaged the Internet and found someone suggesting that I try unchecking my website from the 'Sites' list in the Web Service config pane - I did this and tried loading the Web Service and it worked! Of course, with the website unchecked, it wasn't getting me very far in practical terms :) I chose to create a new site in the 'Sites' panel (with the same config as the old site, minus the Aliases) and clicked 'Start Webservice' - hey presto, I was back online!