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

[Platonides]

Phillip Corchary wrote:
>  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.

The rendered page is cached. The extension can disable the cache just
for pages using it
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Tag_extensions#How_do_I_disable_caching_for_pages_using_my_extension.3F