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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 04:23:30PM -0500, Stirling Westrup wrote:
> 
> Recently, I've been encountering a new problem. PmWiki has proven
> popular, and some of the domains want to run farms of their own, so that
> they can install domain-wide skins and recipes, as well as field-local
> customizations. Of course, I still want to have a single installed copy
> of the software so as to keep upgrades as simple as they currently are.
> 
> I've yet to figure out if such Multi-level farms (farms of farms) are
> possible. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they were trivially
> easy, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they require a bunch of
> special customization.

Your domains can easily create their own domain-wide recipes.  If
they set a variable (say, $DomainD) to be the directory that is
holding the domain-wide recipes, then they can generally do

    include_once("$DomainD/cookbook/recipe.php");

from any of the fields, and it'll load the recipe properly.

Skins are a bit tougher -- at the moment they're hardcoded to look 
strictly in ./pub/skins/ and $FarmD/pub/skins/ .  I could probably
convert this into an array of some sort, so that a domain
administrator could set

    $SkinDirList = 
      array('./pub/skins', "$DomainD/pub/skins", "$FarmD/pub/skins/");

and it would search the field, domain, and farm skin
directories respectively.  Actually, come to think of it,
the setting would probably have to be more like:

    $SkinDirList = array(
      './pub/skins'         => $PubDirUrl,
      "$DomainD/pub/skins'  => 'http://...domain.../pub/skins',
      "$FarmD/pub/skins'    => $FarmPubDirUrl);

since PmWiki needs to know both the locations of the skin
directories and the corresponding urls used to access them.

Pm