I have started used the MediaWiki software for a new purpose: internal organizational planning. I work with a couple of nonprofit organizations, and I'm helping them set up and get familiar with using their own internal wikis to develop meeting agendas, draft policies, and so forth. It seems to work quite well for this purpose. Has anyone else tried this? I'd be interested in comparing notes.
This has also raised my interest in writing some hooks into the software. For example, my prwatch.org website has a page that lists staff bios. We've recently added several new staff members, and it has occurred to me that it might be nice to use our internal wiki as a way for each staff member to be able to update and maintain his or her own bio. They could add it to our internal wiki (which is passwork-protected), but then I could use SSI includes and some custom PHP to display the text of the bios inside pages that look like static HTML to people who visit the prwatch.org web site.
To make this work, I'd need a standalone parser for the wiki markup. I've tinkered at the edges of the MediaWiki code, but I don't understand it well enough to know where the parser resides or how I'd adapt it to make a standalone parser. Can someone here give me some guidance?
Incidentally, I think there might be some commercial potential for this type of application. I can imagine a lot of situations where companies would find wikis helpful both for internal organizational planning and for maintaining the publicly-displayed content of their websites, but where they would want to ensure that only authorized people are allowed to modify the content. If these hooks were written into the MediaWiki software, someone could probably make a nifty living out of going around as a consultant and helping companies set this up.
--Sheldon Rampton