Meza/more

Why Meza is More Valuable Than Simply Downloading MediaWiki

Enterprise-Grade Deployment Automation

MediaWiki alone: Manual installation, configuration files to edit by hand, extension management is manual and error-prone.

Meza: Single meza deploy monolith command that orchestrates:

• MediaWiki core installation with proper versions
• 100+ pre-configured, battle-tested extensions
• Automated database setup and updates
• Web server configuration (Apache/PHP-FPM)
• Search integration (Elasticsearch/CirrusSearch)
• Automatic TLS security certificate provisioning
• Full logs and audit trails for change management

Production-Ready Extension Stack

Meza automatically installs and configures:

• VisualEditor with proper Parsoid integration
• Semantic MediaWiki with property rebuild capabilities
• CirrusSearch for enterprise search
• Flow for modern discussions
• 50+ other extensions with tested configurations

See more on the features page.

MediaWiki alone: You'd spend weeks researching, installing, and configuring each extension individually.

Multi-Environment Management

# Meza supports multiple environments out-of-the-box
meza deploy production
meza deploy staging  
meza deploy development

Each environment has separate:

• Configuration hierarchies (/opt/conf-meza/public/<env>/ and /opt/conf-meza/secret/<env>/) making it so simple to have development tools and settings for your 'development' environment while your 'production' environment is configured separately. Meza configuration operates with inheritance and overrides.
• Database backups (automated before updates)
• Deploy locks to prevent conflicts

Operational Excellence

Automated maintenance (logged):

• Database backups before each deployment
• update.php runs for all wikis automatically
• Search index rebuilding
• Semantic data rebuilding
• Log rotation and cleanup for all services

MediaWiki alone: All maintenance is manual scripting.

Multi-site Architecture

Meza supports multiple sites in one deployment:

sites: meta, biz, demo, policy

Each gets:

• Separate databases
• Individual configuration
• Shared extension stack
• Unified management

Infrastructure as Code through Ansible

Meza uses Ansible playbooks and role-based configuration to manage complex MediaWiki deployments, rather than manual LocalSettings.php editing.

The actual complexity Meza manages includes:

• 40+ Ansible roles for different components
• Dynamic path resolution and configuration hierarchies
• Per-wiki configuration directories (/opt/conf-meza/public/wikis/<wikiId>/) with inheritance
• Jinja2 templating for generating MediaWiki configuration

vs. MediaWiki: Manual LocalSettings.php editing (on each node?) possibly with no version control integration.

Enterprise Security & Scalability

• Multi-server deployments: Load balancers, database clustering, GlusterFS
• SSL automation: Let's Encrypt integration
• Access controls: Fine-grained permission management
• Backup strategies: Automated, tested restore procedures

Time to Value

• MediaWiki download: Days/weeks to get a production-ready wiki
• Meza: Minutes to deploy, hours to customize

Meza offers a complete enterprise MediaWiki deployment with search, visual editing, semantic capabilities, and operational tooling - all from a single command. That's the Meza value proposition.