olocada

The logical model for Wiki content is simple:

A WikiTopic lives in a ContentBase
Each ContentBase has an associated TopicNamespace that scopes the names of all of the topics in that namespace
A collection of ContentBases is called a WikiFederation
A single installation of this software runs a WikiFederation

All content for a WikiFederation is stored in the file system. The files include:

The federation configuration file (see below)
A folder to hold the content for each WikiBase

One .wiki file for each topic
One .awiki file for each archived version of a topic

The root of all things: the FederationConfiguration

The web.config file points to a FederationConfigurationFile using a web-server virtual path (not a file system path).

The key FederationNamespaceMapFile is used to point at the federation configuration XML file. For example:

 <configuration>
    <appSettings>
        <add key="FederationNamespaceMapFile" value="/NamespaceMap.xml" />

In the configuration file is information about the federation, including a list of all of the WikiBases in the federation. For example:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <FederationConfiguration>
  ...
  <Namespaces>
    <Namespace Root=".\wikibases\FlexWiki" Namespace="FlexWiki" />
  </Namespaces>
  ...
 </FederationConfiguration>

In this example, there is only one namespace in the federation and its content is stored in the folder .\wikibases\FlexWiki. This could be an absolute file-system path, but in this case it's a relative path -- relative to the location of the NamespaceMap.xml file itself.

This location is called the WikiBase's RootFolder.

Note

the Root for a namespace in a <Namespace> element will only be considered relative if it starts with .\. This might be surprising if you expect other common forms of relative paths to work; they won't!

Inside a WikiBase

Once you get to the RootFolder of a WikiBase, you'll find a few things:

A collection of *.wiki files, each of which contains topic content (e.g., My HomePage Test.wiki contains the content for the HomePage topic)
Two special topics

The ContentBaseDefinition topic (in ContentBaseDefinition.wiki) which contains the definition of the ContentBase (see ContentBaseDefinition for details of what's in this file)
The home page topic (by default, called HomePage but can be overridden in the ContentBaseDefinition)

A collection of *.awiki files, that constitute the change history for all the topics in the WikiBase