[pmwiki-users] Supplemental install; swapping versions during beta testing

Pico pmwiki at ben-amotz.com
Fri Sep 22 07:38:52 CDT 2006


Anticipating the next round of betas, I was thinking about ways to install a new
beta for testing on existing wikis while retaining the pre-existing install of a
prior version.

My initial thought is that the new beta could be:

(1) installed in a new directory and configured as a farm (local/config.php ->
farmconfig.php),
(2) invoked by an substitute index.php located in the pre-existing wiki, and
(3) swapped in, and out, by toggling between old and new index.php files.

It seems to me that this could be applied to existing sites regardless whether
they currently use a home or a farm install.  For an existing farm install, we
are just pointing wikifields to a different farm.  For a home install, we would
be trying to point away from the locally installed php files to a different set
located in a separate farm.

In either event, the new farm install would need to include a copy of all
cookbook recipes and skins, and the farmconfig.php should probably explicitly
set some path variables.

As for the swapping mechanism, the simplest way is just two keep two versions of
an index.php and copy or rename them to toggle between installs.  That means
that the wiki pages are never being accessed by more than one version of PmWiki
at the same time.  (But what if we wanted to allow both versions to be used at
the same time, so that the old engine continues to be used generally, while the
new version is available to beta-testers, how could that be done?  Would it work
to just explicitly point the browser address to a non-default php file that
points to the new beta (such as http://www.example.com/wiki/indexbeta.php)? 
Other ideas?

What do you think?  Will this work, or have I overlooked something fundamental?
Can you anticipate problems that this might create?  Are there better ways to
accomplish the same goal (of being able to toggle between old and new installs)?


Pico





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