[Pmwiki-users] Cookbook.WikiFarm

John Rankin john.rankin
Sun May 2 23:50:15 CDT 2004


On Tuesday, 4 May 2004 3:55 AM, Steven Leite <steven_leite at kitimat.net> wrote:
>Not quite.  There are some distinctive differences between Groups, and
>Farms.
>
>Farms are meant to be quite seperate from Groups.
>
>Imagine a Farm being a seperate user_id on a ISP.  Each user can run
>their own
>copy of PmWiki.  The nice thing is, they are all running from the same
>core code,
>so upgrading is very easy.
>
>This is the "idea" of a Farm.  I think JR can better make the
>distinction between
>WikiFarm and Group/Subgroups.
>
>--S

Steven puts it pretty well; I don't have a lot to add.

>From an author's perspective, there is no hierarchy, just fences between clusters of groups. The result is that each field is like a separate wiki:
- search is limited to the current field
- each field can have its own passwords, template, uploads enabled / disabled, and so on
- there are no new markup constructs; it uses intermap links between fields on the same farm
- fields share the PmWiki and Profiles groups (optionally), in the same way they share the code base
- "my groups" don't interfere with "your groups" -- we can both have a Main.HomePage

Eric is right that some of these features could be implemented using sub-groups. However, my experience so far is that authors find the farm idea simple and natural -- the typical reaction has been "Is that all there is to it? OK, I get it".

I agree that hierarchical groups are a richer data structure. OTOH, I have not been convinced that the benefits of hierarchical groups outweigh the additional conceptual complexity in most cases. And I think the idea of a wikifarm is easier for people to work with and find their way around in.

I'm not sure about "syntactically simpler" since the wikifarm just uses existing wiki markup.

Any wiki that has lots of groups or anyone that has lots of wiki installations may find a wikifarm useful. It should still be possible later to add sub-groups on a per-field basis, if somebody develops a customisation for it.

JR
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Eric Celeste" <efc at umn.edu>
>To: "PmWiki Users" <pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com>
>Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2004 7:30 PM
>Subject: Re: [Pmwiki-users] Cookbook.WikiFarm

>> Am I the only one who sees a clear echo of the "hierarchical groups"
>> proposal in this WikiFarm implementation? It seems to me that
>hierarchical
>> groups would be syntactically simpler and functionally more flexible.
>>
>> ...Eric
>>
>> Eric Celeste / 612-624-4126 / efc at umn.edu / http://umn.edu/home/efc
>> Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
>> University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) Libraries
>
>
>-- 
>Pmwiki-users mailing list
>Pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
>http://pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com
>


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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