===== About Farms =====

Farms allow you to have a single DokuWiki installation (The "Farmer") that powers an arbitrary number of
other wikis (The "Animals"). You install plugins and templates in the Farmer only and then make them available
through to the animals. You only need to keep one wiki uptodate and all other wikis just use the same code base.

After completing this setup step your current DokuWiki (the one you're looking at) will be known as the "Farmer".

===== What does this Setup do? =====

This setup wizard will do three things:

  - create a ''inc/preload.php'' file
  - create a ''conf/farm.ini'' file
  - optionally append to the ''.htaccess'' file

The ''preload.php'' is a file that is loaded at the very beginning of loading DokuWiki. Here the farm mechanism is
inititialized. The Farmer plugin will detect if the current request should access an Animal or the Farmer and
reconfigure everything accordingly.

The ''conf/farm.ini'' contains the basic configuration of the farm setup. Most importantly it will contain the
location where all the animal's data will be stored.

The ''.htaccess'' modification makes animals accessible through the //bang!// mechanism. (See below)

===== What to fill in? =====

The **Animal Directory** is where a new directory is created for each Animal you create. This directory has to be
outside your current DokuWiki. You can specify a relative directory like ''../animals''.

Enabling the **.htaccess** support is recommended. This feature requires Apache with mod_rewrite and .htaccess support.

When enabled, your animals will be accessible under the farmer's URL using the //bang!// mechanism.  Eg. if your farmer is
running at ''%%http://www.example.com/dokuwiki/%%'', an animal will be accessible at
''%%http://www.example.com/dokuwiki/!animal%%''.

If you do not enable this, you will have to configure your Webserver and DNS to access the animals.