[pmwiki-users] Wiki farm confusion

[Neil Herber]

At 2006-03-15  06:19 PM -0500, The Editor is rumored to have said:
>As I've read through the maze of posts, it's become quite obvious to
>me we're using the word farm in multiple ways:  a farm install (the
>approach), a farm field (a field), "the" farm field (the barn field),
>the farm itself (the barn).  That's where the ambiguity is.  Using my
>barn idea seems to make thngs very simple, clear, and intuitive--which
>is what makes PmWiki so great.  It separates the code (the equipment
>in the barn) from the data (the fields, where our wiki's are hopefully
>growing).

I am not ready to buy your barn yet, nor am I ready to sell the farm 
and give up on fields. You are absolutely right that the major 
problem is imprecise or unnecessary use of the word "farm".

To flog this dead horse one more time (and no, the horse was not in the barn!):
* A farm (or wiki farm) is a collection of two or more wiki fields 
running on the same server 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.
* The "home field" is where most of the PmWiki code (particularly 
pmwiki.php) lives.

There should be no such thing as a "farm field", because a farm is a 
collection of fields - just like in Green Acres country.

The original docs did (maybe still do) refer to the home field as the 
"farm field" and that is what completely confused me. The farm is all 
the fields together.

What I have called the home field could just as well be called the 
main field or the master field or the mother field - those are all 
concepts that lend themselves to immediate understanding of the 
relationship between the fields. Calling it the barn field does not 
do this, to my mind.

Jo and Hagan are proposing to completely isolate the code by removing 
it from the webroot. In that scenario, your barn is no longer in a field.

If the word field is what is causing the problem, then what about 
retaining the farm name, but calling fields wikis (as was suggested 
elsewhere). Then my three points read as follows:
* A farm (or wiki farm) is a collection of two or more wikis running 
on the same server that use one copy of the PmWiki code.
* Each wiki lives in its own directory and has its own URL.
* The "home wiki" is where most of the PmWiki code (particularly 
pmwiki.php) lives.

And then we could add:
* Some admins prefer to store the PmWiki code in a directory which is 
not a wiki. In this case there is no "home wiki". See WikiFarmsAdvanced.

But I still strongly believe that WikiFarms should describe how to do 
a vanilla install and then add one or more  fields (wikis) with the 
common code kept in the original "home field" (home/master/mother wiki).

All the rest of the bewildering permutations can be kept elsewhere so 
as not to frighten new admins away.


Neil

Neil Herber
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