[pmwiki-users] Wiki farm confusion
Neil Herber
nospam at eton.ca
Thu Mar 16 13:58:38 CST 2006
At 2006-03-16 01:52 PM -0500, DaveG is rumored to have said:
>I really believe the 'no-field' description way is the right way to
>go here. Perhaps we can combine mine, with yours, with Hagans?
>Personally I prefer a short description of a farm setup (the goal),
>a step-by-step up front (I invariably head to the instructions to
>see what I'm getting into), and then other descriptions below.
>
>Here's my step-by-step: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiFarmsDaveG
Dave
On the page I wrote, I tried to provide the absolute minimum amount
of detail that would still let an admin set up a farm. I also wanted
to give reasons that an admin would choose to use or not use a farm -
before any details about how to do it.
I purposely did not talk about directory structures or show the
correspondence between the directory structure and the URL used to
access the wiki.
If a new admin follows the recommendations, they will first install a
vanilla wiki and forget about farms. In doing so, they will see how
the URL relates to the directory and learn about the nesting of the
various PmWiki directories. That is all described on the installation page.
Then creating a farm is a trivial exercise, because they already are
familiar with config.php, pub/skins/, scripts/, cookbook/, and so on.
To create a farm they add one single file (farmconfig.php) to the
existing wiki.
To create an additional wiki in the farm, they create a new directory
with a single file in it (index.php). That's it.
I still think it is of great value to have pages like yours and
Hagan's that show the complete file layout and provide a step-by-step
checklist, but I don't think that info should appear on the main
WikiFarms page for several reasons:
1) it would make the page longer and more intimidating
2) people would be very tempted to move the file structure examples
into the body of the (currently short) descriptions
We would soon be back to a long page with so many examples that it
would made farming look much more complicated than it really is.
I would suggest adding links to pages like yours and Hagan's at the
bottom under a heading like "Step-by-step examples".
Neil
Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668
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