I have started used the MediaWiki software for a new purpose:
internal organizational planning. I work with a couple of nonprofit
organizations, and I'm helping them set up and get familiar with
using their own internal wikis to develop meeting agendas, draft
policies, and so forth. It seems to work quite well for this purpose.
Has anyone else tried this? I'd be interested in comparing notes.
This has also raised my interest in writing some hooks into the
software. For example, my
prwatch.org website has a page that lists
staff bios. We've recently added several new staff members, and it
has occurred to me that it might be nice to use our internal wiki as
a way for each staff member to be able to update and maintain his or
her own bio. They could add it to our internal wiki (which is
passwork-protected), but then I could use SSI includes and some
custom PHP to display the text of the bios inside pages that look
like static HTML to people who visit the
prwatch.org web site.
To make this work, I'd need a standalone parser for the wiki markup.
I've tinkered at the edges of the MediaWiki code, but I don't
understand it well enough to know where the parser resides or how I'd
adapt it to make a standalone parser. Can someone here give me some
guidance?
Incidentally, I think there might be some commercial potential for
this type of application. I can imagine a lot of situations where
companies would find wikis helpful both for internal organizational
planning and for maintaining the publicly-displayed content of their
websites, but where they would want to ensure that only authorized
people are allowed to modify the content. If these hooks were written
into the MediaWiki software, someone could probably make a nifty
living out of going around as a consultant and helping companies set
this up.
--Sheldon Rampton