[pmwiki-users] selling pmwiki to high school students

[Chris Knadle]

On Saturday, February 01, 2014 20:04:35 jdd wrote:
> Le 01/02/2014 18:12, Crisses a écrit :
> > A few recipes on top of PmWiki make it MUCH more user friendly, like drag
> > &
> > drop attachments, NewPageBoxPlus, etc.
> 
> as maintenance,
> 
> * pmwiki do not allow direct online update (my most wanted feature... but
> not in the PM philosophy, I guess :-), when wordpress do this on a snap,

This really depends on how you've installed Wordpress; if you've installed 
Wordpress as a /package/ on say Debian and thus getting security support from 
the OS team, then you can't simply update Wordpress directly because you'd 
need root level access to do so.  I'd never want to run Wordpress such that it 
can overwrite files owned by root.

> * but moving pmwiki from a place to a other is extremely easy, as simple as
> taring (archiving) the hole site, when moving Wordpress is extremely
> difficult, and backig up needs to backup both database and folder.

There are many advantages to running a wiki that doesn't use a database.

> * an other drawback of pmwiki regarding updates is the plugin (cookbooks)
> update. I manage several pmwikis, on different servers, and I have problems
> remembering what is installed where

That is the nature of customizations.  Making yourself some kind of 
"breadcrumb" information like a text file listing what sites you've deployed 
and what customizations each are using could help.  This is likewise true when 
using separate pmwiki instances that you need to upgrade individually rather 
than using a wikifarm.

> * good point (extremely good) for pmwiki is the ability of having farms,
> that is several wiki instances managed with the same source, with this I
> could open omwikis for friends in a matter of minutes and don't worry for
> updates there - the longer is to set the virtual server in apache :-)

The really interesting thing about wikifarms is that you can install the 
pmwiki wikifarm such that all files are owned by root:root such that they 
cannot be altered by a normal user.  :-)  I've been running a wikifarm this 
way for years without any trouble so far.  The only thing you need to be 
mindful of is whether you're including cookbook recipes and other 
customizations from the local "field" or the "farm" when doing an 
include_once() for them.  $FarmD is only needed when loading customizations 
from the farm.

  -- Chris

--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us