[pmwiki-users] Wiki farm confusion

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Thu Mar 16 14:26:12 CST 2006


The Editor schrieb:
> P.S. For those of you who are longterm PmWiki users, or professional
> programmers, it may be difficult to appreciate how exciting it was for
> me to find simple, creative analogies used to explain how this
> software works. After working extensively, and frustrating with
> several complex, high-powered CMS's, PmWiki was a breath of fresh air.
> Another analogy!  :)

And a good one :-)

It's just that "farm" is just meaning too many things to too many 
people. And (more importantly) not conveying the intended meaning.

I agree in general that analogies are a good idea. They can make 
understanding easier, and help with "feeling at home".

I don't have a good term handy. I don't think that agricultural 
analogies are very helpful though - they are all associated with too 
many different things (unsurprisingly: agriculture is one of the most 
time-honored activities of humanity).

Since I'm a programmer, I'd do away with analogies and say: "Install 
PmWiki, and run your wikis off the installed code. The installation even 
comes with a wiki pre-configured, so if you don't plan on running 
multiple wikis on the same machine, you can simply unpack the archive 
and wiki away!"
Gives me enough fuzzy warm feelings to make me happy.
... but then again, I'm a programmer, so the things that give me warm 
fuzzy feelings are quite different those for a nonprogrammer ;-)

Regards,
Jo




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