## A use case

Why I needed this plugin: I have two web servers available to me
for a project. Neither does everything I need, but together they
do. (This is a bit like the [Amazon S3
scenario](http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/running_a_wiki_on_Amazon_S3/).)

Server (1) is a university web server. It provides plentiful space
and bandwidth, easy authentication for people editing the wiki, and
a well-known stable URL. The wiki really wants to live here and
very easily could except that the server doesn't allow arbitrary
CGIs.

Server (2) is provided by a generous alumnus's paid [[tips/DreamHost]]
account. Disk and particularly network usage need to be minimized
because over some threshold it costs him. CGI, etc. are available.

My plan was to host the wiki on server (1) by taking advantage of
server (2) to store the repository, source checkout, and generated
pages, to host the repository browser, and to handle ikiwiki's CGI
operations. In order for this to work, web edits on (2) would need
to automatically push any changed pages to (1).

As a proof of concept, I added an rsync post-commit hook after
ikiwiki's usual. It worked, just not for web edits, which is how
the wiki will be used. So I wrote this plugin to finish the job.
The wiki now lives on (1), and clicking "edit" just works.