One approach: Write a custom tag (say, <mydatabase>) that hits your database using the API at http://us.php.net/mysql and returns results. For example, <mydatabase>select foo, bar from blat</mydatabase> could produce an HTML table of the results, with the column names (foo, bar) as the table headings. DanB _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

I use the dbr/dbw convention and have tell it to switch databases to the external db in the extension. $dbr =& wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE ); $dbr->selectDB($yourexternaldatabase); This lets me use MW's built-in db access methods. It took me a while to learn how to do this, but it was worth it. It may be overkill if all you want is SELECT, and when I wrote my first extension, I just used the php mysql functions directly. Jim On Mar 20, 2008, at 4:07 PM, Bin Hu wrote: ===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054 _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l