Wiki report
Background
The MediaWiki API offers great detail into what a MediaWiki wiki is running.
The ApiSandbox extension offers a GUI way to explore and even operate on the API [1]
The most popular data format for API communication is JSON.
PHP handles JSON consistent with the expanded definition of "JSON text" in the newer RFC 7159.
What I need to do is collect data, based on some data that I have in a CiviCRM comment (and the original csv file that was imported to CiviCRM), and re-import or add the new data to CiviCRM for market segmentation and intelligence.
I want to report on that data internally to see my best potential prospects.
I want to include that data in marketing to show prospects that they need to upgrade. Or that they have a number of extensions. Including large amounts of data in a marketing message would be best in the form of a "free report'. The reporting interface can also be used as an ad-hoc intelligence reporter and collector.
Is there an API for inserting data into CiviCRM? (Yes CiviCRM has a full API) Or, do I need to rely on the import tools and formatting my CSV with the correct external ID so as to avoid duplicates?
The basic UI for What's that Wiki Running? could be handled by jQuery, but with Bootstrap added in, we get a bit more stylesheet. Still, do we need that? jQuery can handle the AJAX Simple JavaScript could handle the data presentation (and jQuery probably has some useful methods) and we can add jQuery UI for advanced interactions or widgets.
To do cross-domain javascript requests, we'll need jsonp but, it turns out that you just can't make a secure AJAX UI to insecure web content (Duh!).
In the jQuery .ajax method, there are several settings. The 'error' setting is a callback, and we could write a function there to try other variations on the domain to find the API endpoint.
Interesting example: http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Special:Version which uses the "MediaWiki Bootstrap" skin See http://www.mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk/index.php?title=Main_Page
I decided to use Bootstrap for this project. At first, I was tempted to build a fully client-side framework and JavaScript solution. Since CiviCRM has an API, I could potentially even use JavaScript for pushing data into the backend (authenticated with a secret). Ultimately, Bootstrap was used on the client-side, but PHP was used to create the backend.
Data Table systems in the UI
DataTables can integrate seamlessly with Bootstrap, but it's unlikely that I will need the robustness of Data Tables for this effort. If I wanted to show many records, then yes. But for now, I want to focus on showing the particular details of a specific wiki site.
DynaTables is a jQuery plugin that I began prototyping with, but again, it's not something that I will need since I don't have large datasets to manipulate. I just want to focus on a single wiki at a time. With existing JSON, you still have to know the 'layout' of your data and setup a blank table with the correct structure. I'm more interested in a generic function that you could throw any JSON at, and it would spit out a table.
Tidy Table is a jQuery plugin that creates HTML tables from the data that you feed into the client as JSON The only interesting thing here is the fact that I might want to have something akin to their demo for the initial form state: Allow the user to quickly/easily select which parts of the MW API they want to report on.