Flutterby™! : MediaWiki

When TC procured Flutterby.net for me, his (not so subtle) hint was that I use it for a more personal site. Let this domain continue down its path as a community, toss the links here, and go back to journaling on the other site.

I know what I'd like to do, but that involves a few months building a content management system the likes of which the world has not yet seen (see my snippet manager musings). However, I've got a bunch of people, time and money resting on my ability to ship code that's not a web app, so that'll have to wait.

So I threw MediaWiki in a subdirectory, locked down the security a bit because I saw using it as a tool to help us with our event organizing, and then tried to pump a whole bunch of data into it.

So I grabbed the Python Wikipedia Bot framework, and... after trying to track down the various errors and issues when attempting to point it to something other than Wikipedia.org, I finally gave up and slapped something together with Perl's WWW::Mechanize.

There are things about MediaWiki that are really well done, but it seems like the intent of the software is to put the interface issues more in the forefront, and what I want is a content manager that is built around the notion that I'll want to let programs and alternate interfaces talk to it more. I understand why it's evolved to be what it is, but it'll take more than a crowbar to make it do what I'd really like.