[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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