An API for Wikis? Here's one.

Some folks are experimenting with using Wiki to build websites. I particularly like what Matt Haughey did with PHPWiki and a bit of CSS magic dust. Looks nice, eh? [Via Seb's Wikis are Ugly? post at Corante]

Janne Jalkanen's Wiki-based Weblog is interesting too. Hmm. Maybe blog API(s) can be used for Wikis too. That reminds me, shouldn't Wiki formatted text have their own MIME type? Is there one? "text/wiki"? For now, different dialects of Wiki formatting rules will have to be accounted for like "text/wiki+moinmoin".

It's been a while since I last worked on it, but I did implement an XML-RPC API on a few wikis, called XmlRpcToWiki. Janne Jalkanen did a lot of work toward the same interface with JSPWiki. I use this API in the linkage between my blog and the wiki on this site. Now that I've drifted away from XmlRpc a bit and am more in favor of simpler REST-ish web service APIs, I'd like to see something more toward that end. Seems like a lot of people are discovering or rediscovering wikis since the introduction of Sam Ruby's wiki for Atom/Echo/Pie work, so it's interesting to see a lot of things come up again like grousing about APIs and mutant wiki-format offshoots and standards.

shortname=wiki_apis

Archived Comments

  • Joe Gregorio recently posted today how the Atom API is great Wiki API too, http://bitworking.org/news/An_editable_web .
  • But it still leaves you the issue of the formatting of the contents, since different WikiEngines use different SmartAscii flavors. http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/SmartAscii
  • You should give a look at TikiWiki http://tikiwiki.org the package has grown to become a full service CMS/Portal. Not exactly ugly either. Al
  • look at http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/search/Main/SearchResult?scope=text®ex=on&search=Xml%20*Rpc%20*To%20*Wiki%5B%5EA-Za-z%5D
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