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

[Neil Herber]

At 2006-03-15  07:43 AM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
>FWIW, I did a little bit of searching yesterday to see what other
>packages use as an equivalent to our "wikifarm" term, but didn't
>find anything.

Warning: rambling comments below do not reduce confusion.

I haven't found anything like wikifarming, unless you want to 
consider virtual domains in Apache to be equivalent. The only other 
packages I use with multiple installations on the same server are 
PHPBB and Simple Machines Forum (SMF).

I used to have two installations of PHPBB but I replaced them with 
SMF and added a third install. Unlike PmWiki I could not find any 
simple instructions for either package on how to share the code among 
different directories. I would not be surprised to find out that it 
is a common thing to do, but I couldn't locate the docs or figure it 
out myself so I just made full installs in each directory.

In some ways this is an advantage, because I can completely isolate 
each forum. I can experiment with one (making mods) without affecting 
the other two. This is possible with PmWiki as well, but not if you 
are making mods at the farm-wide level. (I can't think of anything 
that you can't try on one field though.)

So really, it is probably a perception issue. It feels to me like the 
3 separate installs are "safer" from each other than my PmWiki fields 
are. But if I look through the other end of the telescope, I can see 
that it is easier to secure all the PmWIki fields with just a few 
changes in the farmconfig.php file.

It is a pain to make upgrades to the 3 SMF installs, but that pain is 
mitigated by a built in "package manager" which downloads and 
installs the components. That would be a nice frill to add to version 
7.1.1 of PmWiki. For now, there are lots of other more useful issues 
to address.


Neil

Neil Herber
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