[pmwiki-users] setting up some blogs

[pcoud at free.fr]

Selon Bronwyn Boltwood <bronwyn at bronwynb.info>:

> I'd like to create a couple blogs, so I thought I'd ask how blogging
> support is going, and get ideas on what I can do using the latest
> betas.  I'd like to use PmWiki for this, since I would not have to
> spend days or weeks learning how to tweak it (unlike Wordpress,
> Textpattern, etc.), and I really want versioning.  Blog engines
> generally don't do versioning.
>
> One project is a professional blog that I want to integrate with my
> portfolio.  The second project is a serialized novel or diary of an
> RPG campaign.  It might be one blog with different authors, or one
> field per author. (This one is the reason versioning is so important
> to me.)
>
> Essential features:
>
> - Categories -- already working smoothly

Hello,

I'm afraid that categories as they are today in pmwiki are unusable for a site
with numerous pages, especially a blog (lots of small pages). I did a quick
benchmark using the [[!Category]] style mark up on a wiki with 5,000 dummy
pages (a few lines each), with only one page belonging to a category.
Displaying this category (which contains only one of the 5,000 pages) takes 18s
:

Page last modified on February 06, 2006, at 12:56 PM timing=

00.00 MarkupToHTML begin
00.05 MakePageList begin
00.49 MakePageList scan
18.76 MakePageList sort
18.76 MakePageList update
18.76 MakePageList end
18.78 MarkupToHTML end
18.78 Category.Benchpagelist
18.80 MarkupToHTML begin
18.85 MarkupToHTML end
18.91 MarkupToHTML begin
18.93 MarkupToHTML end
18.93 now

(run on a single user mac G4 1.67ghz / 1 GB of ram, timing range from 10 to 18+s
depending on the run)
On an on-line site with several users, the same scenario would like hit into php
timeout,
or at least user frustration :-/

IMHO, for a strictly file based wiki, the way to go would be the "categories
knows their pages" as discussed
here:

http://tavi.sourceforge.net/TaviCategories

For the pmwiki's approach ("page belongs to categories"), either a category
index or a full text search index (for fast category tracking, as in wikka) is
needed to make category browsing smooth. I know there is a .linkindex file
which is supposed to speed up (:pagelist:), but is it used for command such as:
(:pagelist '!{$Name}' list=normal:)

or only for command of type (:pagelist link=... :) ?
Because in the former case (used in the test), there is no difference in the
timing with and without enabling the linkindex.

To pmwiki's credit, I found strange to see pmwiki much faster at rendering very
big pages, than wikka's much simpler engine, which does not have the expressive
and rich pmwiki's mark up.

P.