Accessing wiki content from another web app

[Mathias Gug]

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.

-- 
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer  http://www.ubuntu.com