Hint: If you don't know what the terms 'federation', 'namespace', 'TopicNamespace' and 'WikiBase' mean in the context of FlexWiki, see WikiFederationOverview.)

The FederationConfiguration is an XML file that defines most of the important things about your federation (the namespaces in the federation, etc.). You identify your FederationConfiguration file in the web.config file on your server (see WebConfiguration for details).

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>
     <DefaultNamespace>FlexWiki</DefaultNamespace>
     <NamespaceProviders>
         <Provider Id="B75C029B-EE08-4a07-BFBD-F59E99DEA564" 
                   Type="FlexWiki.FileSystemNamespaceProvider" 
                   AssemblyName="FlexWiki, Version=1.0.10.4515, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null">
             <Parameters>
                 <Parameter Name="Root" Value=".\wikibases\FlexWiki" />
                 <Parameter Name="Namespace" Value="FlexWiki" />
             </Parameters>
         </Provider>
        <Provider Id="B75C029B-EE08-4a07-BFBD-F59E99DEA564" 
                  Type="FlexWiki.FileSystemNamespaceProvider" 
                  AssemblyName="FlexWiki, Version=1.0.10.4515, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null">
            <Parameters>
                <Parameter Name="Root" Value=".\wikibases\SecondNamespace" />
                <Parameter Name="Namespace" Value="SecondNamespace" />
            </Parameters>
        </Provider>
     </NamespaceProviders>
     <About>This site is the home of FlexWiki, an experimental collaboration tool.  Read FlexWiki.OneMinuteWiki, 
 FlexWiki.VisitorWelcome or FlexWiki.PNADocumentation to learn more.
     </About>
 </FederationConfiguration>

In this example, we define a configuration with a default namespace (FlexWiki), two WikiBases and the About setting (see FederationBranding). Each namespace must have a namespace provider; in this case both namespaces are provided by the filesystem namespace provider (as opposed to, for example, a SQL Server namespace provider).

In this example, there are two namespaces in the federation and their content is stored in the folders .\wikibases\FlexWiki and .\wikibases\SecondNamespace. These could be absolute file-system paths, but in this case they're relative paths -- relative to the location of the NamespaceMap.xml file itself. This location is called the WikiBase's RootFolder.

Configuration Options

The following options can (and sometimes must) appear in the federation configuration file:

<DefaultNamespace>

This defines the namespace whose HomePage will appear when a user visits the front page of your FlexWiki site and hasn't specified a specific page to view.

<About>

This setting lets you control the About text for your site. See FederationBranding for more details.

<NoFollowExternalHyperlinks>

This setting controls whether FlexWiki will generate user-supplied hyperlinks with the appropriate HTML to support the NoFollow anti-spam initiative.

Setting to a 1 will enable NoFollow support. Setting to a 0 will disable this support.

Q: Like this? <NoFollowExternalHyperlinks>1</NoFollowExternalHyperlinks> . For some reason this does not work. Any ideas?

A: Yes. Make sure you have a recent InterimBuild. -- DavidOrnstein

<WikiTalkVersion>

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<BlacklistedExternalLinks>

This is a series of <Link> elements, each one a string.

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<NamespaceProviders>

This is a list of namespace providers (e.g. a filesystem namespace provider). For each namespace there must exist a nested <Provider> element in this element, even if you have two namespaces provided by the same provider. In other words, each <Provider> element defines a namespace by providing the appropriate parameters for that namespace provider to find the wiki data for that namespace.

For a file system namespace provider (example above) there are two necessary parameters in the configuration file: Root and Namespace. These parameters define the "RootFolder" for the namespace and the name of the namespace, respectively. The Root parameter values can be either absolute filesystem paths or relative paths. Relative paths are relative to the location of the FederationConfiguration file itself.