[Mediawiki-l] Idea for MediaWiki - Thoughts on how to implement

[Paul Betts]

Hi! I came up with an idea for MediaWiki and I was wondering if I could
get the mailing list's thoughts on it. One of my favorite applications
is a program called Tomboy (the site is down, but the wp article on it
is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_%28software%29). What would be
really awesome is that same kind of simple interface, but attached to a
MediaWiki backend, so this personal note-taking tool would be a great
way to collaborate. 
	Naturally, for really big wiki's this interface would probably be more
cumbersome than anything, but for small group projects it'd be
fantastic! Basically, here's what I came up with for how to implement
this, but I don't know much about MediaWiki so your opinions would be
very valuable; I'm implementing it in .NET to take advantage of the
existing Tomboy code (and because I like .NET)

1. Make an ASP.NET web service that responds to SOAP requests and
queries the MySQL database directly.
	- This way is version dependent, somewhat bad in software design
because now it's meddling with internal MediaWiki structures
	- Requires being installed on the server
	+ However, if it works, other applications could use it as well
	+ Doesn't require patching MediaWiki itself

2. Add an RSS feed to get recently changed page names and names of all
pages that exist, and use custom POSTs to submit new pages.
	- Requires patching / adding to MediaWiki
	- Still need to find a way to get the text of a page in MediaWiki
format
	+ Other apps could still use it but it would only work on patched wikis

3. Don't touch the server at all, use screen scraping and post requests
to do everything client-side
	- Ugly, custom themes might bust it
	- Very version dependent
	+ Works with all MediaWikis

I think that this project could definitely make MediaWiki more useful in
the area of small-group collaboration. If anyone's interested in helping
write it or has any ideas, I'd be glad for the help!

-- 
Paul Betts <paul at paulbetts.org>