How do Wiki Farms work?
I want to build and sell a product that is a private MediaWiki site
that can ingest logs and display them in templates and still have room
for people to add notes about the device or service being logged using
the Cargo and probably the ExternalData extensions.
The problem is that I haven't seen the back end of a Wiki Farm yet so I
don't know how one typically works.
I know what I need. I need to build a site with the necessarily minimal
plugins for functionality, a way to upgrade the mediawiki instances, a
way to potentially upgrade php, a database with 1-2 schema per site,
and probably all of the templates packed into one plugin for ease of
management.
My first plan would be to make Ansible do everything on the back end
and have a php button kick it off. There are probably a bunch of
weaknesses in the strategy, but they were so small that Redhat bought
Ansible Inc. so they can use Ansible as part of the new base for
Satellite.
https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/09.2%20CloudForms%
2C-satellite-and-ansible-by-Red-Hat-Doing-More-Together.pdf
This manual
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family has a few
different methods. Extensions are either in beta or not maintained.
The Ultimate minimalist solution are symlinks and an array. Writing a
program to writes another program perfectly every time is not something
I know how to do just yet. Using git to upgrade all of the web code
sounds like a good idea right now though.
I think copying the WikiMedia method would make a little more sense
because I have an account there and I see that it works and haven't
heard any complaints recently. The whole thing is template based and is
primed to be done by ansible which is also template based.
I could try Drupal-style sites, but I never had good luck with Drupal.
I am still going to bit by the fact that they will have to be private
wikis that don't share most users except for the the farm
administrators is going to add another issue potentially. I will also
need to eventually get another factor of authentication in because
people demand it, but there is probably something in PHP already. https
://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Two-factor_authentication already works
apparently.
I do need to figure out some failover so I don't have to babysit the
thing too much and so I can upgrade the Operating System.
I want to attempt this project, but I don't know if I know enough about
Wiki Farms yet to start. Guess I can try it and fail a few times and I
can tell you what I didn't know, but is there anything obvious other
than marketing.