[pmwiki-users] wiki farm vs individual programs

[Neil Herber]

At 2005-06-02  09:40 AM -0500, David Sovinski is rumored to have said:
>Thanks. I'm looking at doing as you've suggested with a wiki farm. Will it 
>be possible to set up a separate PITS for each "field"?
>We are going to be maintaining one version of a program and starting to 
>write the specifications for next revision of the program and want to keep
>bug reports from version 3.x separate from development bug reports for 
>version 4.0.

The fields behave like completely separate wikis. PmWiki creates pages from 
the files stored in the /wiki.d directory. Each field has its own /wiki.d, 
so you can have identical page names in each field with totally different 
content.

Plugins like PITS can be installed once in the farm and they then 
immediately become available to all the fields. PITS is a "form manager" 
for creating and indexing pages, and it puts the pages it creates in /wiki.d.

You can spend a lot of time asking things like "will plugin X work without 
interfering with the other fields". The amazingly simple answer to all such 
questions is "each field acts like a totally separate install of PmWiki". 
Anything installed in the farm is available to all fields, anything 
installed in a field is available to it alone.

I was initially skeptical about using fields (the docs were confusing to 
me) but in retrospect it was the best decision.

I just thought of one other reason for having separate installs - it would 
allow you to run different versions of PmWiki in each install. The only 
good reason for doing this would be to test a new version before rolling it 
out. But an easier way to do that is to maintain a test wiki. You can just 
copy all of the local files from any field to the test wiki and see what 
happens. In my experience - everything works!


Neil

Neil Herber
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