[pmwiki-users] Totally Perplexed by Farming and Fields...

Neil Herber nospam at eton.ca
Sun Jan 22 17:01:31 CST 2006


At 2006-01-22  04:53 PM -0500, gdb at soundchasers.com is rumored to have said:
>Am I getting too far ahead of myself here?  Or am I going to be up for an
>extreme challenge?  (Aside: I know that one of the tricks here is going to be
>masking out the tools pages from search results.  But I hoped that might be
>easier if I were able to just mask the whole field.) Speaking of 
>this -- here's
>another question I hadn't thought about: can the user search across 
>all fields?
>
>Should I just consider falling back to having a single wiki and use the groups
>to their advantage as much as possible?

George

Wikifarms can be very confusing. I know it took me a long time to get 
my head around them. But now that I have, I am an avid wikifarmer. My 
rules of thumb may help you:

1) Do I want to have completely separate content - as though I had 
several separate websites? Then I should use a farm, where each field 
behaves like a completely independent website.

2) Do I want to have related content chopped into easy to handle 
chunks? Then I should use groups in one wiki.

3) Do I want to share stuff (like help pages) between fields? Then I 
should check out the http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/SharedPages recipe.

4) Do I want to share more stuff between fields than the SharedPages 
recipe allows for? Then I probably should be using one wiki with groups.

I have configured my farm so that one of the directories (fields??) 
is the mother. It contains all of the PmWiki code, and it is what I 
update when a new version of PmWiki is available. I *do not* have any 
user pages in this field - it is used solely to hold the PmWiki components.

Each of the daughters has its own local/config.php where I set the 
skin and other customizations. In fact, once I had the mother and a 
daughter set up, I just dealt with the daughters as if they were 
standalone wikis.

The mother does have some customization, but that is generally for 
things like the Blocklist script that I want all of the daughters to have.

Here is another (lame) attempt to clarify how to choose ...

Suppose you want to create wikis for five universities. Each one has 
and Admin department, faculties of Arts, Science, etc.

You should create a farm with five fields - one for each university. 
Each field would have the same group structure (more or less) 
corresponding to the departments. The actual content, however, would 
be completely independent, except for a "help" section that describes 
how to use the wiki.

I hope this helps somewhat ...

I have a farm with seven fields in it (well, seven daughters with one 
mother wiki). Of those, only 2 are public, and you are welcome to 
view them. They all share a common help group.
http://neil.eton.ca/wiki/
http://saturn.eton.ca/wiki/   ---  the access password is one level 
up at http://saturn.eton.ca/ so start there.
The shared help is at: http://neil.eton.ca/wiki/index.php/Shared/HowToUse

I have more details about my setup at 
http://neil.eton.ca/wiki/index.php/Main/MyWikiFarm


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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