On 8/16/07, Maury Markowitz maury.markowitz@gmail.com wrote:
As I understand it, the MediaWiki system works by interpreting the "source code" as stored in the database and rendering it into HTML. I am curious to know how tightly connected the code is to the database.
The parser is, at present, very tightly connected to the rest of the code, and it cannot be easily extricated. A long-term goal is to write a better parser of some kind, ideally after making wikimarkup more regular and well-defined, but until then third parties either have to initialize the whole MediaWiki package or write their own parser and be incompatible in corner cases.
The Parser should not, however, be tied at all to the database. I'm fairly sure it would be easy enough to write an entry point that can parse arbitrary wikitext from stdin or wherever you like, you would just have to install and maintain a full local MediaWiki installation (including PHP but not necessarily MySQL or Apache, at least after you've generated LocalSettings) to do it.