Finding the Wiki (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Tex to rtf converter)

[Rob Rye]

On Aug 6, 2010, at 1:23 PM, Victor Ivrii wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 4:11 PM,  <cfrees at imapmail.org> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> It's probably best to organise the snippets in an SQL database which
>>> should also offer a text search inside the code examples.
>> 
>> You mean integrate a database into the wiki? I don't know anything
>> about databases so I wouldn't know what's possible.
>> 
> 
> mediawiki itself runs on the top of SQL database as there are no pages
> as html files residing on the hard disks and all pages are cooked on
> the fly and served.
> 
> I never heard about mediawiki extensions working with external sql
> database but one can create this beyond wiki.
> 
> Victor
> 
So far as I know the only extension that allows for some dynamic content to be added from an external mysql database to a mediawiki instance is 

sql2wiki (which can be found on the mediawiki extension matrix at mediawiki.org)

I looked into using this extension for a wiki I had installed for internal use in my institution a while back. I chose not to deploy it, so I never did gain any real expertise here. Also, it has never gotten past the beta release status that it had three years ago when I last looked at it so it may be abandon-ware. 

Nonetheless, it may be possible to use this extension to query a well-crafted database of LaTeX code snippets that could then be served up as suits the user's needs (or at least their searching skills). Once installed, one would have to think long and hard about how to code the sql query statements, based upon user input, to make it truly searchable via the wiki. Such programming is well beyond my capacity, but I figured I would point to the extension if anyone wanted to take up the challenge. 

Rob