[pmwiki-users] RFC: PITS 00701 -- WikiFarm confusion

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 03:12:06PM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> As pedantic as it sounds, what if we agreed on some terminology?
> * A farm (or wiki farm) is a collection of two or more wiki fields 
> that use one copy of the PmWiki code.
> * A field is a single wiki with a unique URL. Each field lives in its 
> own directory.

These are excellent definitions.

> * The "home field" is where most of the PmWiki code (particularly 
> pmwiki.php) lives. Calling this the "farm field" or "farm directory" 
> seems confusing to me, because the farm (to me) is the whole - not a 
> part. The home field may have wiki content, or it may just be a 
> warehouse for the code.

I think "home field" is an excellent name (if I can just keep
the baseball and football analogies at bay :-).  It's still a field,
but it's also the field where the code lives.

> * A single installation of PmWiki can be converted to a farm by 
> nominating it as the "home field" and adding other fields. (The 
> nomination is a concept, not a real process.)

Nice.

> To simplify matters, the WikiFarms page should talk about how farms 
> work and how to set one up from scratch without getting too worked up 
> about security and all the possible options for directory placement.

This is what the WikiFarms page was originally intended to do,
but I think it slowly got modified away from that concept.

> A WikiFarmConversion page could describe how to change an existing 
> single wiki to a farm.

This is excellent also, although I wonder if the title could make
it clearer that we're converting a single wiki to a farm (as opposed
to converting a wikifarm to something else).

> A WikiFarmAdvanced page could talk about security, moving directories 
> to unservable areas, sharing pages among fields, and so on.

Definitely.

Pm