[Mediawiki-l] Completely changing the Image: and Media: functionality

[Daniel Barrett]

At my company, we are thinking about replacing MediaWiki's uploaded file
tree (/w/images) with a third-party content management system (CMS), as
transparently as possible.  An example might be a subversion repository,
WebDAV system, or Microsoft SharePoint. What would people recommend as
the most MW-compatible way to do this, using extensions when possible,
likely to survive MW updates, and without making big changes to the core
MediaWiki source code?

I think the major integration points are:

- Image pages (e.g., Image:Foobar.jpg), which must retrieve the uploaded
file and the revision history from the CMS
- Image links, e.g., [[Image:Foobar.jpg]], which must retrieve the
uploaded file from the CMS
- Media links, which must access the uploaded file within the CMS and
render a useful link
- Special:Upload, which must add new revisions to the CMS
- The various other File-related special pages like Special:Imagelist,
Special:Newimages, etc.

I see a few helpful hooks: ImageOpenShowImageInlineBefore in
ImagePage.php, BadImage in ImageFunctions.php,
BeforeParserrenderImageGallery and BeforeParserMakeImageLinkObj in
Parser.php, etc.  I am comfortable adding new hooks, but if possible
would like not to make any other core code modifications.

Thanks for any tips.
DanB