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2007-02-28

Is it possible to ask wikicopy to copy multiple wikis source wikis to multiple seperate destination URL’s all in one shot? – SamRose

Sam; What about an approach of simply using FTP to sync the source?

And I have found several advantages that suggest I should keep an open mind about this method. – HansWobbe

I see what you mean Hans. We could easily try this on a test server, or mirror actual wikis, etc. If you’d like to try this, let me know. It would be worth playing around of with some of the simplier ideas from our brainstorms about this, just to see what we can come up with.

I was actually asking about wikicopy in relation to a different problem, related to the work that MattisManzel has been doing in OBM and kabo WikiHives?. He’s been manually copying over some templates of WikiHive centers and WikiHive lists to new WikiHives? we’ve been creating. I thought that the wikicopy script could make this process easier when launching a new WikiHive, by copying certain Empty wiki template wikis over, with pre-created pages, saving the time of copying and pasting. So, I wondered if you have to use wikicopy on one wiki at a time, or whether you can do a whole bunch of seperate source and destination wikis all at once.

Sam; I don’t yet know how oddmuse stores its pages (e.g. I suspect its in some database like MYSQL), but several of the wikis we use simply store data in files. For those, a simple copy of the (sub)folder is all that is needed to create a new copy. In my environments, there is less concern about large volumes of users (where a DB is generally essential) than there is about ‘flexibility’ for individual Authors (who generally do not know enough about CSS). – HansWobbe

Hans, thanks for your response. Actually, I know for sure that you are right, OddMuse stores pages in files, with no database at all. When you set up OddMuse, you create a directory where it stores that data. The wikicopy script allows you to copy those files in one shot from one server to another (see Migration). I guess I’ll just have to try it out. But, I think I can do what I am asking here, I just don’t know the exact UNIX command line structure, but I think I can figure it out. I am mostly asking here for he benefit of other people.

Eventually, I am going to write a page about my experience setting up OddMuse WikiHive installations.

Oddmuse uses files to store data, but wikicopy doesn’t need access to these files. It uses ordinary HTTP requests to get pages from one wiki and post them to the other wiki. The URL acts as an API, so if I knew how other wiki engines worked, it would copy pages from Oddmuse to MoinMoin? or other engines, too. (It wouldn’t translate markup, however. You’d have to do that with lots of search & replace operations.) What I’m having trouble with is understanding “copy multiple wikis source wikis to multiple seperate destination URL’s all in one shot.” How is that different from saying “wikicopy A B; wikicopy C D; wikicopy A F” and so on? Using a sync mechanism on the level of files is tricky, because you’re bypassing RecentChanges. Using wikicopy fixes this. It adds the necessary log entries. – AlexSchroeder
Thanks for the clarifiaion, Alex. I seldom make use of the Recent Changes in the Personal Wikis I run, so I completely over-looked the fact that they could be important in an active Community. Of course, for a simple useCase of trying to distribute snapshots of pages, a simple file copy might be quite adequate. I’ll ponder this over the next few days. – HansWobbe

MattisManzel:
Copy all in one shot. That might mean setting up a new wiki-hive becomes almost as easy as setting up a new wiki. You run the script and it creates and fills in the basic page structure on:

For every further language you need the center-wiki, the sand-wiki and the empty-wiki translated.

Imagine many hives. I’d like that.

But you know about it, me I’m just watching. --mm

AlexSchroeder: Well, you can use the Migration instructions to copy a wiki from this site to another. It doesn’t help you with the tech setup, unfortunately. It just copies the pages. :)

HansWobbe: One possibility I am pondering is the creation of a “distro” that could combine all of the required software into a single Object (which could take the form of a CD or a TAR or ZIP file). My Objectives are …

Perhaps this approach be extended to reduce some of the work Mattis is doing too?

SamRose: hans, I think we can actually do your distro cd idea right now with the tools and scripts that exist. We’ll have to try it out. Me and Mattis are already going to try out the Migriation/wikicopy script for hive set up.

Mattis has made some “empty” wikis on different hives that are templates. It’s just a matter of copying those over to a cd. They can even have “template” pages set up (like HowTo, etc etc).

On a related issue, I noticed that OddMuse has an extension called “Page Syncronization” see: OddMuse:Page_Syncronization

This is another idea for syncing OddMuse wikis, just thought I’d let you know about it.

I’ve been going around in circles gathering information about various ways of building a distributed wiki. And here I see you’ve gone ahead and done it. Excellent. – DavidCary