I have started work on a new project, MediaWiki Farmer. The goal of the project is to make it trivial to manage a MediaWiki wiki farm. Think of it as a user-friendly alternative to the SiteConfiguration class. The bottom line is that it will allow anybody to turn a MediaWiki wiki into a site like Wikia.

Here is the quick summary of Farmer:

* Create wikis via a web form (like http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Special:CreateWiki) ** As soon as you click the submit button on the form, the wiki is created and can be instantly accessed

* Multiple wikis can be run from one MediaWiki source tree -- no need for symlinks

* Farmer is extensible and light weight. Overhead of Farmer is a few string comparisons and the inclusion of a per-wiki configuration file. All the heavy lifting is done when things change. Farmer is also designed with extensibility in mind. All functionality is built into a base class, which can be extended and modified to suit your needs.

I haven't released the source code yet (I want things to mature a bit), but I already have Farmer automatically creating wikis via a web form, properly initializing the database, and recognizing the new wiki via wildcard DNS.

I have been assembling documentation on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:IndyGreg/Farmer for public consumption. I would appreciate feedback to the project there, or via this list.

As I continue with the project, I look forward to community input.

Gregory Szorc gregory.szorc@gmail.com