Wiki - table content from an external source - html

Question

Is it possible to have a wiki page with two tables reflecting the data from two different 3rd party sites?
If so, how to get it done? Will page templates be of any help here?

Answer 1

Short answer is no, there's no easy, built-in way to pull external content into a MediaWiki site. Allowing a third party to inject arbitrary content would be massive security risk.
Long answer is that anything is possible with extensions, either existing ones or ones you write yourself. The MediaWiki site has an entire category of listings for "Remote content extensions" that do this kind of thing in one form or another, with External Data looking particularly useful. You will need admin rights to install any of these, and you'll need to trust both the extension code and the data you pull in.

Answer 2

I already wrote exactly what you describe. Might be helpful for you.
# Define a setup function
$wgHooks['ParserFirstCallInit'][] = 'efStackOverflow_Setup';
# Add a hook to initialise the magic word
$wgHooks['LanguageGetMagic'][] = 'efStackOverflow_Magic';
function efStackOverflow_Setup( &$parser ) {
# Set a function hook associating the "example" magic word with our function
$parser->setFunctionHook( 'stag', 'efStackOverflow_Render' );
return true;
}
function efStackOverflow_Magic( &$magicWords, $langCode ) {
# Add the magic word
# The first array element is whether to be case sensitive, in this case (0) it is not case sensitive, 1 would be sensitive
# All remaining elements are synonyms for our parser function
$magicWords['stag'] = array(1, 'stag');
# unless we return true, other parser functions extensions won't get loaded.
return true;
}
function efStackOverflow_Render( $parser, $param1 = '', $param2 = '' ) {
// there was filtering
$modif = 0;
$cache_file_path = "cache/".$param1."_".$param2;
if (file_exists($cache_file_path))
$modif = time() - #filemtime ($cache_file_path);
if (file_exists($cache_file_path) and $modif < 60*60*24) {
return file_get_contents($cache_file_path);
}
$page = file_get_contents("http://www.google.com/rss/".$param1);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($page);
foreach ($xml as $key => $value) {
// do some
}
if (!empty($output))
file_put_contents($cache_file_path, $output);
return $output;
}
Mediawiki version was 1.16.