Extensions &MediaWiki robchurch on 16 Jan 2007 11:19 pm
Pimp my Special:Booksources
It’s extension writing time, again – a new one, BookInformation is en route soonish. It will allow site owners to configure web services such as the Amazon Web Services set that can be used to perform basic informational queries when users are accessing Special:Booksources.
The whole thing’s nice and object-oriented, and is based around the concept of a “book information driver”, which is a class implementing a straightforward interface spec, so writing drivers to handle providers other than Amazon will be relatively simple.
This probably won’t make it live on Wikipedia or any Wikimedia wiki, simply because we’d have to find a provider who would allow us to access their web service at a relatively high rate. There’s built-in caching of responses per-ISBN, but it wouldn’t choke the Wikipedian influx enough for quite some time.