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This is an old revision of SyndicatingWikka made by DarTar on 2005-10-25 09:33:48.
Syndicating Wikka Wiki
This pages is a stubI would like to collect on this page some thoughts about the development of advanced tools (a sort of API) to allow syndication of the content and/or the structure of a wiki.
There are already several ways of syndicating the content of a wiki running on Wikka:
- trough some of its built-in RSSInfo rss feeds;
- through the use of some dedicated handlers (like the /raw handler) -- see IncludeRemote for a possible use of this handler;
It would be interesting to explore the possibility of extending these tools to include other handlers, producing output in different formats (XML, RSS, MM, raw text) to be used by external sites or services to syndicate the content of a wiki.
A particularly interesting case would be that of wikis syndicating information from each other.
Consider for instance a meta-wiki (A) collecting information from a number of child-wikis (B,C,D).
(A) might use dedicated actions to:
- connect "live" to (B), (C) and (D),
- retrieve information from each of them through the use of dedicate handlers,
- process, format and display such information "locally".
For example, suppose (B), (C), and (D) possess a handler outputting a RSS feed with the number of new registered users per day. (A) could use an action to syndicate (B), (C) and (D), process the data available from their feeds, and use something like a built-in BarGraph graphic class to output a chart comparing the evolution of the number of users for each of these wikis.
There are many possible uses of similar syndication tools to extract information from a wiki at different levels:
- page content (e.g., the actual body of a page)
- page metadata (e.g., the last author of a page)
- wiki structure (e.g., the categories present on a wiki)
- wiki metadata (e.g., the number of pages on a wiki)
We just need to identify such uses and start designing dedicated tools.
Feel free to add here your thoughts/suggestions.
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