[Mediawiki-l] Building two sites using one wiki - how to manage similar (but different) content

[Platonides]

Evelyn Yoder wrote:
> Greetings, all -
> 
> Continuing the learning process to master MediaWiki...if you remember
> from last time, our goal is to create online support/help sites for
> two software products. As of last week, we successfully created two
> websites based on the same wiki content. Each site has a different
> skin, logo and sidebar, and they share the same images and extensions.
> 
> Because the products are similar, most of the articles will be the
> same. However, some of the articles need to have different content.
> So, out of a total of 500 pages, maybe 30 need to change, depending on
> which product is the focus.
> 
> I'm thinking I can use transclusion and parserfunctions to manage the
> content for these "'special" pages, but I need to know if it is
> ridiculous to attempt this? 

Yes, they can be used. No need even to use parserfunctions.
Page: This product
Content: {{Product {{PRODUCT}}

And set Product as a Magic Word depending on the wiki used ({{SITENAME}}
may already contain your product).

However, you'll need to use a different cache for each wiki (or disable
caching altogether) or you may see on wiki B content saved on wiki A
(with wiki A's version).


> And what about CategoryTree - it's a
> great extension, but will parserfunctions also work to make the
> Category assignments?

You can use parserfunctions to choose the category. But the category
assigment will be the same for both wikis (last save/purge wins). So I'd
recommend against it.


> Can a custom namespace help in this instance? Is there another way to
> go? Thanks in advance for your advice.

No. Custom namespaces are nor the solution for your problem. You can
have a different namespace for each product. But you can as well place
the product name in another part of the title.