How to use ISAPI_Rewrite 3 with MediaWiki

Introduction

MediaWiki is a powerful and very popular wiki-engine which was originally written for a popular free encyclopedia - Wikipedia. In this short article you will see how to configure SE-friendly URLs in MediaWiki and how ISAPI_Rewrite can help you with it.
In this article we suppose you already have IIS and ISAPI_Rewrite 3 installed. To write the article we used ISAPI_Rewrite 3.1.0.56 and MediaWiki 1.13.1.

Getting and Installing MediaWiki

You can download MW from this page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download. After downloading please install MW according to installation instructions provided by the vendor.

Enabling SE-friendly URLs

Default MediaWiki URLs look like www.yousite.com/index.php?title=TITLE. but you can change them by using two configuration variables in LocalSettings.php: $wgScript and $wgArticlePath. In this article we will try to make simple SEO-friendly urls like www.yousite.com/TITLE.

So, please open LocalSettings.php document (it is located in MediaWiki root folder) and append this code:

$wgScript = "";
$wgArticlePath = "$wgScript/$1";

Please note! The $wgScript variable must contain path to your MW folder. For example, if your MW installation is C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mediawiki, then you must write $wgScript = "/mediawiki", or if your MW installation is C:\inetpub\wwwroot\, then you must write $wgScript = "";

Now please create .htaccess file in the installation folder of MediaWiki and put these rules into it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?title=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

Done! Now you can use MediaWiki with pretty SE-friendly URLs.