On 9/4/07, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
I believe Duesentrieb's excellent Gadgets plugin does quite a lot of this...
+1
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets
Great stuff....
Though it doesn't solve the issue that started this thread. The issue that started this thread is how to get tighter integration of some properly external tools such as the mapping tool Dschwen built. Right now it works okay as an iframe, but that creates some silly limitations.
There is also all sorts of development for tools targeted at established Wikimedians rather than the general public, such as Bryan's hacks on things like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:FlickrSearch?withJS=MediaWiki:Flic...
Some things like WikiMiniAtlas don't make a lot of sense as an extension (as an extension it would only be a piece of JS and a daemon totally external to mediawiki).
Some things might make sense as extension, but keeping them external is useful for testing, prototyping, and early versions. Not only is their a shallower learning curve for external tools, but their is fault compartmentalization: if you misunderstand how MySQL 4 is going to handle a query the whole site doesn't go down. And of course the ability to casually hack on something as new feature requests come in ... without having to nag someone to push the updates live... is nice.