Accessing wiki content from another web app

[Ahmed Kamal]

On 07/30/2010 09:01 PM, Mathias Gug wrote:
> Hi Ahmed,
>
> Excerpts from Ahmed Kamal's message of Tue Jul 27 07:17:30 -0400 2010:
>    
>> I have been asked to work on building a consolidated web portal for
>> everything that relates to Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Part of what I want
>> to do is to gather lots of documentation pages from the wiki, and
>> present them in a consolidated manner on that portal. I think it's a
>> good idea to keep the content on the wiki, where it's easy to edit for
>> everyone, while dynamically pulling content from the wiki to construct
>> that consolidated reading material in an eye pleasing manner. The web
>> application will most likely be a Django app. The way I am imagining how
>> to pull this off, is to have the Django app connect to the wiki using
>> its API (xmlrpc or similar) and pull the contents of its pages, which
>> then renders them in a way that blends with the look and feel of the portal.
>>
>>      
> What's the reason to have a read-only copy of the documentation directly
> into the portal?
>
> If the goal is to have the documentation more reader-friendly I'd
> suggest to actually improve the wiki *itself* so that it benefits
> everyone.
>
> It should also be possible to organize the wiki pages as a book. It
> seems that one of the step in importing the documentation into the
> portal is to organize it - why not do that directly in the wiki?
>
> As far as branding is concerned it may possible to brand differently all
> relevant sub pages.
>
> I'd rather see the documentation linked from the portal and indexed
> when searching from the portal.
>
>    Write once, read at one place, linked and indexed from  many places.
>
>    
Hi Mathias,

Thanks for your feedback. I agree that the wiki itself should be 
improved, and the "book style" collection of pages should be made 
available on the wiki itself, I'll try to add that there too. As for why 
this documentation is being presented in a read-only manner over that 
portal. Well, although this decision has been made for me up in the 
chain, the reasons I understand why this is needed, is to provide a 
new-comer with one central location that has all the information he 
would need about the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud product. Asking a 
new-comer, probably from a Windows background to locate the ubuntu wiki 
and click through 50 pages there can be a high barrier for entry. 
However again, for all the Ubuntu geeks out there, I agree the wiki 
should always be the canonical source of information. That's why I'm 
keeping all the info there and only mirroring it somewhere else

Regards