Mediawiki Template, Mediawiki Skins

Mediawiki is a PHP-based software package originally intended for use in Wikipedia. Now the package is being used for many other purposes of the Wikimedia foundation. The software is now being distributed under the terms of GNU version 2. It is one of the top class open source software available for free in the internet. The original software was created by Lee Daniel Crocker based on the user interface design by Magnus Manske. This software soon replaced its predecessor UseModWiki that was a written in Perl. The name mediawiki was coined by Daniel Mayer with an intentional similarity to wikipedia.

Best features of MediaWiki

• It is an open source software and is available for free to users
• It is easy to edit the web pages online as well as check the results immediately
• Cumbersome processes of using FTP or uploading is completely eliminated in mediawiki
• It allows various users to work on the same project in short is an excellent collaboration tool.
• It supports content generated through specialized syntax such as LaTeX
• It allows images to be arranged in galleries a feature of absolute necessity
• It aids in generating images and thumbnails with ease

MediaWiki's wikitext format allows users without the slightest knowledge of XHTML or CSS to edit web pages easily. Apart from this feature, the software has the capability of effectively managing multimedia files too. It can easily be coupled with squid proxy server software for large wikis with good number of users.
MediaWiki also has good many features go beyond hyperlinks for structuring content, such as name spaces. Here, namespace is a prefix before a page title that serves as a descriptor to the purpose of page purpose and allows many pages with various functions with the same title. Apart from the namespace feature, contents can also be ordered using sub pages. This feature provides creation of auto generated breadcrumbs to the components.
MediaWiki also comes with a basic set of features that can be used to assign access levels to users. Although not to the extent of forum packages this is a highly useful feature in mediawiki software.
In spite of so many exciting features meidawiki also has its own limitations. For example, the parser of mediawiki software has no formal syntax and due to this there are some difficulties in creating a WYSIWYG editor. One other limitation is that mediawiki has no offline version which makes it easy for the users to update content offline and then transfer it to online pages. However, there are a lot of researches and work in progress to make mediawiki the best free open source software.
The kind of efforts taken by the mediawiki team is highly commendable. To know more about mediawiki it would be ideal to visit the official websites of mediawiki where you can find apt answers to all your questions in the FAQ section of the website. There is also an online support where you can contact support personnel to get your doubts cleared.