Re: [sfWiki-devel] info.php3

[Iain S. C. M. <cr...@me...>]

On 20 May 00, at 15:00, Todd L. Miller wrote:

> 	Should saving a WikiTopic* update all pages links-to-me field?  

Yes it should.  I think it should be easy (at least in my 
implementation it turned out pretty simple).  

One page only links to a limited number of other pages (under 20 
would probably cover 90% of the pages in the wiki). So only those 
pages need to be updated (a fast task), and you're really only 
updating their pre-rendered info page.  

In addition, page edits are rare compared with page views (we see 
about 10 page edits a day if we're lucky) so the page editing 
process can be pretty expensive and slow.

As far as contention, i'd ignore it.  it should be rare (once again, we 
see only 10 page edits a day if we're lucky), and the info page is 
only a guide.  if its wrong by a link or two, give or take, its not the 
end of the world.  it will get fixed the next time another page 
adds/removes a link to it, or the page itself gets edited.  I suppose 
if it really bothers you, we can also just include a link on the page 
that the user can use to manually refresh the info it looks 
suspect... i'd say its not needed (added complexity for developer, 
maintainer, and user with limited additional utility).

> *: It would be interesting to write a WikiFormatter for emails :) **:

Definitely.  And for java and php source code....

> Which brings up the question of generating the global information page.  
> I think once-a-day (e.g. by cron) or from the admin pages on-demand is a
> good way to go about it; on-the-fly generation will be rather expensive,
> and there's probably not a good way to pre-render/cache it -- every edit
> would have update things, which would get messy.

Agreed.  Athough, at least with our JOS wiki, it will probably be 
less cpu expensive to do it every time a page is edited.  We have 
many days where no edits occur at all, and it rare to see more than 
5 or 6 edits a day.  I imagine, when a wiki is new, there are a lot of 
edits, but not much info to process, and as the wiki matures, there 
are less edits as the information becomes more comprehensive 
and starts to be used more for reference (reading only) rather than 
constant edits.

-iain