I've not used mediawiki much, instead my organization uses the python based moin moin. I've found it very easy to create plugins and modules and have done things like you've described. We have created a graphviz plugin so that it will show a graphviz chart in the page. Also we've created "formatters" which are plugins that modify the outputs of blocks of wiki markup surrounded by {{{ }}}.
<br><br>Some people in my company have created external packages for talking to moin, for example "editmoin" available at <<a href="http://labix.org/editmoin">http://labix.org/editmoin</a>>, though I've seen or heard of other tools people have thrown together.
<br><br>I have to ask, are you sure that a wiki is the right tool for the job? I love the easy editing that a wiki provides, but for highly structured content you start to loose the benefits of a wiki and you might gain by using a CMS that provides a decent development platform.
<br><br>I'm excited about the wave of rapid development tools out there (my favorite is Django but Ruby on Rails, Cake and Symphony are all in the same boat). I can whip out a complete web application in Django in 3 - 4 hours which includes an admin interface and input validation. I get a real database backend and my admin forms have helpful explanatory text next to each form field so people don't have to fuss with special wiki formatting or markup.
<br><br>I think its fun to hack on the wiki but as I move forward I'm solving these types of problems with simple web applications built with django.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 20, 2008 7:52 AM, Todd Walton <
<a href="mailto:tdwalton@gmail.com">tdwalton@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I want to set up a wiki that my team can use to track a variety of things like:
<br><br>1) System statuses ("Intranet is down" "database will be down<br>Wednesday night" etc)<br>2) Employee availability ("Todd has PTO Tuesday, Jan 29")<br>3) Various notes ("if a client has problems with this app,
<br>such-and-such has been fixing it lately")<br><br>I need the tool to be flexible and I want all team members to update<br>it regularly. Right now, that's all I know. I've set up Mediawiki at<br>home, and installed a calendar plugin. That's pretty nifty. I'll
<br>probably need a calendar for this work wiki, but I'm not sure about<br>how I'm going to set this up. I'm still mentally working on a<br>pre-alpha architecture. (Read: wtf am I doing?) Anybody have any<br>
suggestions or anecdotes?<br><br>-todd<br>_______________________________________________<br>Cialug mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Cialug@cialug.org">Cialug@cialug.org</a><br><a href="http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug" target="_blank">
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Matthew Nuzum<br>newz2000 on freenode