Author: anakin

Description:
I have recently been using a personal installation of MediaWiki to maintain a set of web pages on my home machine, for my own personal use in scribbling assorted notes about things. I've found MediaWiki's markup to be pretty much ideal for this purpose, since it supports mathematics typesetting (many of my notes are mathematical in nature), tables and image embedding, but is an extremely light markup format (much easier to write than LaTeX or even HTML) and has much better support for generating output in the form of a collection of HTML pages with hyperlinks between them.

However, the rest of the MediaWiki infrastructure is not useful to me, and in fact is somewhat counterproductive: my database and web server administration skills are virtually zero, and so I fluctuate between accidentally allowing anyone to edit my personal notes pages and accidentally not even allowing myself to. And if my database ever gets corrupted, I've really no idea how I'll restore it; migrating it through a Debian upgrade was more than enough of a headache.

I would much prefer that my files of notes were simply stored on disk as text files in MediaWiki markup format, and that there were some standalone Unix utility I could just run from a makefile which converted them all into static HTML pages. Then I could keep all my notes, and the accompanying image files and (occasionally) scripts that generate image files from PostScript source or similar, in an ordinary source control repository, which would allow me to track changes and control access to them by means which I'm more familiar with and which are more suited to my particular needs.

I've checked over the MediaWiki 1.12 download archive and haven't found any obvious indication of such a utility already existing; but it seems to me that it shouldn't be too difficult to construct one by writing a simple front end on some of the existing code.

Does such a thing exist (or is there an existing Bugzilla entry for it) which I've missed? If not, would there be any interest in providing one?

(I'm willing to write code for it myself, given a few pointers about where to start. My vague thought is that one would start with includes/Parser.php, and write a simple command-line front end to the Parser class plus some back-end hooks to divert the database access functions to a text-file based storage model. But I'd like to find out if there's interest in including such a utility in the real code base before I start; if I have to maintain my own hacked-on version of the MediaWiki code base in perpetuity then I might look at alternative options instead.)

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement