Hi! I came up with an idea for MediaWiki and I was wondering if I could get the mailing list's thoughts on it. One of my favorite applications is a program called Tomboy (the site is down, but the wp article on it is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_%28software%29). What would be really awesome is that same kind of simple interface, but attached to a MediaWiki backend, so this personal note-taking tool would be a great way to collaborate. Naturally, for really big wiki's this interface would probably be more cumbersome than anything, but for small group projects it'd be fantastic! Basically, here's what I came up with for how to implement this, but I don't know much about MediaWiki so your opinions would be very valuable; I'm implementing it in .NET to take advantage of the existing Tomboy code (and because I like .NET)
1. Make an ASP.NET web service that responds to SOAP requests and queries the MySQL database directly. - This way is version dependent, somewhat bad in software design because now it's meddling with internal MediaWiki structures - Requires being installed on the server + However, if it works, other applications could use it as well + Doesn't require patching MediaWiki itself
2. Add an RSS feed to get recently changed page names and names of all pages that exist, and use custom POSTs to submit new pages. - Requires patching / adding to MediaWiki - Still need to find a way to get the text of a page in MediaWiki format + Other apps could still use it but it would only work on patched wikis
3. Don't touch the server at all, use screen scraping and post requests to do everything client-side - Ugly, custom themes might bust it - Very version dependent + Works with all MediaWikis
I think that this project could definitely make MediaWiki more useful in the area of small-group collaboration. If anyone's interested in helping write it or has any ideas, I'd be glad for the help!