Topic on Project:Support desk

I'm using: MediaWiki 1.18.1; PHP 5.3.8 (apache2handler); MySQL 5.5.16-log. My wiki is behind a corporate firewall so you will not be able to view it.

I would like to make Special:Categories the wiki main page. I thought I could do this by transclusion, but it doesn't seem to work. I can transclude

{{:Special:Allpages}}

but not

{{:Special:Categories}}

. Is there a way to accomplish what I want?

My first thought was: Do an Apache redirect. If the requested URL is just the domain or domain/Main_Page, redirect the user to the category page. Performancewise this should be the best solution I think.

Another way would be to place a redirect on the Main Page, so that MediaWiki redirects the user to that category page.

Thanks, I like the redirect idea for its simplicity. At the very least it's a good temporary solution.

A related question:

How do I change the text in Special:Categories. I looked through SpecialCategories.php and found what appears to be a function to include 'categoriespagetext', but my knowledge of PHP is pretty rudimentary and I can't figure out where the actual content text is coming from.

If you want to override an interface text in the wiki: That is possible by putting the text you want on the right page in the namespace "MediaWiki". E.g. if the language label, which you want to override is called "login", then you would have to put the new text on the wiki page "MediaWiki:Login".

Have you checked Manual:$wgAllowSpecialInclusion?

I did, but $wgAllowSpecialInclusion doesn't seem to allow special:Categories. It allows some special pages, but not all. Perhaps special:Categories is restricted for some reason?

Edit MediaWiki:Mainpage and put there Special:Categories