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

[Neil Herber]

At 2006-03-15  11:29 AM -0700, H. Fox is rumored to have said:
>It's confusing to to have a "home field" that doesn't even need to be
>in the web document tree.  When the main installation isn't a wiki
>itself (with a URL, local wikipages, and its own config.php) it's not
>a field.
>
>Put another way, if a field is a wiki with a unique URL (which it is)
>then the main installation isn't a field unless you add a config.php
>and a writable wiki.d/ .
>
>That said, how about simple wording change which, wile subtle, seems
>to make a big difference:
>
>     Rather than calling fields "Wiki Fields"
>     or even fields, call them "field wikis".
>
>That's what they are, right?  The main installation (whatever it'
>should be called) can be a field wiki or not.

The term "field wiki" goes in my eye (or ear), travels toward the 
brain, and then just stops, because my brain can't figure out where 
to store it or what to relate it to.

I think you are saying more or less the same thing that Jo did 
earlier - that there should be a code store and wikis that share that 
code store. (Pardon me if I have mis-paraphrased you both!) This is a 
useful model, but not the original intent of wiki farming as I understand it.

Since we want to have a simple-to-understand page on farming, I think 
we should work from the presumption that an admin would first do a 
single install of PmWiki, test it, maybe make it live, and then think 
about adding a second install.

At this point they may decide to just do a full install in another 
directory or they might decide to set up a farm, in which case their 
existing install can be the home field, and the second "install" can 
be just a field with the wrapper script, config.php, and wiki.d/.

Having what I call the home field outside of the webroot is a 
decision driven more by security concerns or tidiness than anything 
else. In my case, my home field is inside the webroot, but is 
non-servable by virtue of .htaccess settings. And unless I am really 
confused, *some* of the shared code (pub/) has to be in a servable 
directory. What do we call that piece?

If our objective is to allow new (or old) admins to configure farms 
with the fewest problems, then the WikiFarms page should describe 
this vanilla procedure and all of the 8 zillion variations should 
appear on WikiFarmsAdvanced. On that page, you could say "Calling the 
shared code that lives outside the webroot  'the home field' is 
really a misnomer, because <insert reasons here>.."


Neil

Neil Herber
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