Hallo to all of you there.

I'm trying to have a way to speed up development of the initial setup of my wiki before moving to the remote server. I mean, I want to do and see changes in a wiki page with *just* the following steps (not one more!):

1) edit a file in my favourite text editor

2) Alt-TAB to the web browser window with the wiki page shown

3) press F5

(Of course this can also be reduced to just two steps if a keyboard shortcut is configured to focus on the web browser window and force a page refresh).

Summying up, what I would like to accomplish is editing all (or almost all) the wiki by editing plain .txt files, with all the wiki pages on localhost containing just the custom magic word "__GET_CONTENT_FROM_FILE__" (or a {{gcff:}} functions, or whatever).

So, first I've disabled cache in LocalSettings.php:

$wgEnableParserCache = false; $wgCachePages = false;

Then, I've tried hacking "includes/parser/Parser.php", function parse(), like specified in the bottom of this message [1] (yes I know that hooks probably can be used for this sort of things, but I've not studied them and I'm in a hurry, so just making an attempt to see if and how this is feasible: I need to speed up wiki development because I'm short of time ;)

There I check for the presence of the custom magic word "__GET_CONTENT_FROM_FILE__" at the beginning of the $text variable, and if found I replace $text with contents retrieved from a file following some conventions for the filename, if it exists.

This is sorta working, but not like I would like: let me explain.

I'm using SMW and Semantic Forms (but probably this is not important here); anyway, I have e.g. a template called "Test", and a form which generates pages that use the Test template when accessed and rendered. So let's say I have the page "Test Page", showing content using the "Test" template.

If I am with browser on page "Template:Test", I can immediately see any change I do into the "Template;Test.txt" file, just by hitting F5. But, if I am with browser on page "Test Page", it doesn't reflect changes done in the "Template;Test.txt" file: in fact, it uses the Test template content retrieved from the database, i.e. by MediaWiki standard behaviour.

So I'm here asking: how can I hack things in order to have everything retrieved from txt files, as long as the first word in the content is "__GET_CONTENT_FROM_FILE__" and the file (following a name convention, e.g. replacing ":" with ";" to the page name and appending ".txt") exists? I don't need a clean solution, just a way to make it work and let me continue development (i.e. fine-tuning templates, forms appearance, several start-up pages contents, etc.), without having to write code in the textarea and do a button click to save, and then another click to re-edit, etc.).

Or, is someone able to arrange an extension doing what I've explained?

I repeat the "summying up": what I would like to accomplish is editing all (or almost all) the wiki by editing plain .txt files, with all the wiki pages on localhost containing just the custom magic word "__GET_CONTENT_FROM_FILE__" (or a {{gcff:}} functions, or whatever).

I underline this is only for local development, then the "real" wiki (on the remote server) will be a standard one. So security issues and whatever are not a concern.

--------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Here it is my hack attempt (works for simple page but fails for my main purposes as explained above):

public function parse( $text, Title $title, ParserOptions $options, $linestart = true, $clearState = true, $revid = null ) {

/* hack: Get Content From File */ if (substr($text, 0, 25) == '__GET_CONTENT_FROM_FILE__'){

$gcff__directory = 'extensions/ContentFromFile/sources';

// if the path has a slash at the end we remove it here if(substr($gcff__directory,-1) == '/') { $gcff__directory = substr($gcff__directory, 0, -1); }

// if the path is not valid or is not a directory ... if(!file_exists($gcff__directory) || !is_dir($gcff__directory) || !is_readable($gcff__directory)) { // do nothing, go on with normal behaviour using the page content retrieved from the database } else {

// we open the directory if($gcff__handle = opendir($gcff__directory)){

// calculate the file name (via conventions) $gcff__filename = str_replace(':', ';', $title->mPrefixedText) .'.txt';

$gcff__filepath = $gcff__directory .'/'. $gcff__filename;

if(is_file($gcff__filepath)){

// get the page content from the file $text = utf8_encode(file_get_contents($gcff__filepath)); }

// close the directory closedir($gcff__handle); } } } #.........(and then here follows the original code of MediaWiki parse function)............ }