[Mediawiki-l] Help with including/embedding external dynamic content

[Phillip Corchary]

 What I've been trying to do is find a way to embed external content on
MW pages, especially the main page. This is for a departmental team
portal project. The 'external' content maybe be in several forms, and
is typically small snippets of information that are placed in
different places on a page with <div>.

My goal is that each time the MW page is loaded that the external data
is loaded. I've used two methods so far:
<php>include ('http://someURL.php <http://someurl.php/>');</php> and also
using the
'include' extension like <include src="http://.someURL.php"  /> or
<include src="file.inc"  />.

The PROBLEM is that the external data isn't reliably loaded
dynamically. Seems like it's cached somewhere and only updated when I
modify the page -- how can I work around this? (tried disabling
memcached with effect)  The external data are either fully dynamic
(e.g. some php that pulls/calculates data at each execution), or are
peridically updated by some outside method (eg a cron job that runs
every 15min and dumps some results to a txt file).

This is not an attempt to create an ajax-like solution with <div> that
are independent of the page (althought that would be nice too and I
don't know where to even start)... this is only to update each time
the page is refreshed (anyone know a way to add a meta-refresh to a MW
page?)

Thanks in advance ... i've been picking away at this for a few months
with no luck and now i really need to find a solution FAST.