Anyone familiar with wikimedia?

[LFG]

I am in the very early stages of setting up a website with care info for exotic pets - exotipedia.com - and am a little stuck on how to customise wikimedia to suit my purposes... I have read through the various help sections and guides but am just left more confused than when I started.

The following are a few initial tasks which I would be greatful for any help with. Please note my IT skills are limited (I've just got my head around oscommerce and have little prior web experience)

Replace logo with my logo, located at exotipedia.com/logo.png (I have found the code, just every time I edit it to point at my logo it results in either an error or no change)

allow only invited users to post/edit content, but access is public

change 'main page' to read 'exotipedia.com'

change contents of navigation bar

[kittyluver]

Wow... Nice site.would you mind to link with my health sites and wildlifeworld.info? I don't know about the wikimedia

[LFG]

Wow... Nice site.would you mind to link with my health sites and wildlifeworld.info? I don't know about the wikimedia

The site hasn't been started...

[archard]

I made a test site with it about a year ago just to play around with it and I remember there being a lot of headaches trying to get it set up. The thing is there's no admin interface at all. Everything has to be done by editing the config files manually. Luckily there's some pretty good documentation at the MediaWiki website http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki. And I also found some good help at their IRC chatroom which is listed on that site as well. Good luck.

[markn26]

LFG: I also was looking to make a Mediawiki-run site. After 6 months, I gave up because modifying it is just a complete bitch and I didn't have time to waste on it. I found it to be extremely time consuming as Mediawiki has no backend, no skinning/template system or anything that even makes doing these things easy. You might want to look into others, possibly Tikiwiki (which unfortunately isn't as good as Mediawiki).

Why the makers of Mediawiki decided to not give the software a backend panel is completely beyond me!!!!