On 9/4/07, Rob Church <robchur(a)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:Fliā¦
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.