[Pmwiki-users] How best to develop a wiki farm

[John Rankin]

On Friday, 12 March 2004 1:39 PM, Richard Canning <rcanning at connect.com.au> wrote:
>I do like this idea. I currently have about 6 installs of PmWiki
>0.6.9 on my box, simply because I have different uses for the
>wiki, each of which need multiple groups (etc).
>
>The only way that I would want this however is if the core
>application had support for it. Considering it takes only a few
>seconds to upgrade the version, when a new version comes out I
>just update them all independantly. If having this required me
>to take more than a few minutes to update the
>version, then apart from saving 500kb of server space, I am not
>sure what benefit it would have.
>
>Richard Canning
>
It looks as if we can implement this purely as a local customisation.
PmWiki upgrades should just slot in as usual.

The current thinking is to have a Main.WikiFarm page in the 'home' 
field (name administrator-definable) that lists the 'Fields' on
the farm. This will drive a list of InterMap references. The
wikifarm script redefines various pmwiki variables to point to
the necessary directories, creating those that don't exist when
a page in a new field is visited.

The benefit is being able to separate unrelated wiki content,
while maintaining ease of upgrade. That's the goal, anyway.
You are right -- unless it can be a pure local customisation
that fits in with how PmWiki works, it's more bother than it's
worth. So far, Pm has already provided customisable variables 
for everything we need. 

The fact that we can even contemplate doing this is yet another 
tribute to the flexibility of the PmWiki design. How did he 
*know* that some day, someone somewhere wolud want to use all 
these customisable variables?

We looked at just using a set of symlinks, but that's not so
easy when somebody else hosts the site and gives you only
restricted access rights.

"Act always to increase the number of choices."
    -- Heinz von Foerster


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin