Difference between revisions of "UserManual:Error messages"
The
provided source article ("Book:Admin manual (published)") does not exist.The wiki contains a number of system error messages. These messages can be customized to your needs.
For example, if a wiki has a lot of visitors with anonymous read-access only, these visitors get a permissions error when they try to access a page that does not exist:
This creates the impression that a page with that name exists, but the visitor does not have sufficient rights to view the page. In reality, the page simply does not exist and a user with write-permissions could now log in and create the page.
Therefore, we want to distinguish between anonymous visitors and users with write-access and show a tailored error message.
Creating a custom 404 error page[edit| edit source]
If a page does not exist yet, you can display a custom message.
To create the message:
- Create the page MediaWiki:Noarticletext-nopermission
- Add your custom message in edit mode.
- Save the page.
- To test the message, try to access a page that does not exist.Make sure you are not logged in, because this message is displayed to anonymous users only.
How to update an error message[edit| edit source]
The text for the error pages on the wiki is stored in the form of system notifications. You can access these error messages from the page Special:AllMessages.
To find the message or the messages that are being used on a particular error page, add ?uselang=qqx or, if the url already contains a question mark, &uselang=qqx to the page url:
This will expose the actual sources for the error messages on the page:
In the above example, there are two error messages on the page:
- permissionserrortext-withaction: displays the text "You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reason"
- badaccess-groups: displays the text "The action you have requested is limited to users in one of the groups: Administrators, Editors, Reviewers.
These pages do not actually exist, and therefore the standard text message from the database is displayed. If you want to change a message, you must first create the page.
To update a system message:
-
Go to the special page "System messages" (
Special:AllMessages) -
Enter the full name of the system message in the "Prefix" field of the filter:
The link to the system message apears in red.
- Click on the name to create a page for this system message
- Enter your custom error message and save the page. The system message has now been customized.
- Continue to update any other system messages on the page.
Note: Many of these messages use parameters (e.g., "$1"), which should be considered when you change the default text. If something went wrong, you can also delete the custom error pages you created - then the default text from the database will be used again.