Wiki Transclusion

Wiki Transclusion is the term we use to describe the methods we use to manage this site.

The content of this web site is held and managed as a WikiWikiWeb, which makes the collaborative creation of heavily hyperlinked web sites very simple.

The main site http://linux-ha.org/ is created from our wiki site by transclusion - allowing various common page elements seen on the site to be also drawn from pages in the wiki. The resulting web site can then be styled and laid out in any way desired by the tranclusion process, making it easy to make the site attractive and user-friendly. Our current page composition is described in this site composition page.

The combination of these two ideas creates an extremely effective system - simple, powerful content management, along with very flexible and easy-to-manage site layout. The combination of these techniques has exceeded our expectations - both for ease of composition and attractiveness of the resulting web site.

In addition, because the transclusion site is merely a read-only cache of content from the wiki site, one could easily create geographically distributed transclusion sites for a single wiki content engine to make the content available efficiently all across the world.

For environments where extra security for the wiki content is desirable, the wiki itself could be accessible only via authenticated https, or behind a firewall, with the transclusion cache available by normal http and/or outside the firewall.

Since the main public access to the information in such a wiki is through the transclusion cache site, there is no reason to let search engines index the wiki site. Wikis which are not indexed by the major search engines are not of any value to wiki spammers. This should make such wikis much less likely to be spammed.

Since wikis are designed for collaborative information development, this characteristic carries over to the combination of the two, making them ideal for open source development.

Special thanks go to Dmytri Kleiner for introducing us to this idea, and providing the first generation of scripts for the transclusion process. The procedure for updating the web site is described on the HowToUpdateWebsite page.

• -- AlanRobertson

See Also

CVS version of our Wiki transclusion scripts.

Linux-HA site built by the Linux-HA crowd. HTML4 / CSS2