Over a month ago we started playing with the idea of bringing MediaWiki pages into WordPress post. The logic being you can combine the presentation possibilities and RSS feed generation of WordPress with the ease of formatting, editing and collaborative sharing of MediaWiki. The term Bliki is one of the ways folks have been identifying such a hybrid, and I have been really interested in the possibilities (here is a brief overview of the idea from a presentation for the MAC Learning Environments web conference). Andy Rush found themes for both WordPress and MediaWiki that seamlessly tie the two together visually (read more here). Alan Levine found an authentication extension for MediaWiki that allows you to create the same login and password for both applications in one shot (read more here). The next step is pulling MediaWiki pages into blog posts, and we have been doing some preliminary trials here at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. In particular, Patrick Gosetti Murray-John’s has coded the beginnings of what we are provisionally calling the GrabMediaWiki plugin (which is based on the name of a Typo3 plugin that does this very thing and inspired my thinking about it) which can be found here.
I have gotten an earlier version of this PHP code to work (see it here). I have included the exact code I used in that post below -you will need a plugin like EXEC-PHP for this to fly- with varying levels of success: it works well with WP 2.1 and MediaWiki 1.6.8 using the Monobook theme, but balks on the MistLook theme for MediaWiki. Also, it doesn’t seem to treat all MediaWiki installs equally. So, in short, we’re out of our league and we need your help! You can find a working basis of the code on Patrick’s blog and below, but this is a far cry from a seamless WordPress plugin that allows you to enter a MediaWiki URL in a field on the WordPress write post tab and whammo, integration! We are not expecting that outcome immediately by any means, just the possibility that folks who may have some programming chops, or know programmers with lamb chops, take a look at the code (or even a shot at the integration) and see what they might come up with (many eyeballs…). The future of educational technology rests squarely on your shoulders -are you geek enough to save the galaxy;)
get_elements_by_tagname('div');
foreach ($divs as $div) {
if ($div->get_attribute('id') == 'column-content') { //grab only the body of the mw page
$contentDiv = $div; }
if ($div->get_attribute('id') == 'jump-to-nav') { //kill navigation div
$parent = $div->parent_node();
$parent->remove_child($div);
}
$div->remove_attribute('class'); //clear off classes to avoid style collisions. might need to do the same if style attributes are present
}
$h3s = $contentDiv->get_elements_by_tagname('h3');
foreach ($h3s as $h3) {
if ($h3->get_attribute('id') == 'siteSub') { //kill the reference to original mw page
$parent = $h3->parent_node();
$parent->remove_child($h3);
}
}
echo $wppageDOM->dump_node($contentDiv); //spit it out!
?>
Doing some last minute prep for class this evening I stumbled across an interesting fact about the iconic early American minister 
