Wikis are fast becoming a core tool in a lot of companies.  People are using Wikis for just about everything... from a collaborative text editing tool, to the whole website for a project.  Basically.. who isn't using a Wiki these days?

OpenOffice.org is one project that is getting into the Wiki world in a big way.  For example, the OpenOffice.org documentation is being ported over to the OOoWiki.   To get there, we used the MediaWiki export functionality in OpenOffice.org.  This worked great.  The export is almost perfect - only a few small tweaks are needed if the source document is in good shape.

Now that the documentation is actually in the Wiki, we want to get it back out.  I don't mean as HTML in a single Wiki page.... I mean we want to be able to queue a stack of Wiki pages and export them all as a single ODT file.  The question is... how do you do this?

A few people have looked into this problem in the past, but no one yet (to my knowledge) has actually come up with a fully working MediaWiki to ODT export tool (with no "gotcha's" ).  The closest I have seen is found here http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/wiki2xml/php/  This is the source for an extension to MediaWiki.  Once it is installed and configured you get a new menu item in the "Special pages" section of your MediaWiki.  This page looks like this:

The output is reasonable (once you work around the various quirks and bugs in the extension), but it really needs a lot of post conversion work to turn the result into a presentable document.  One noticeable problem is that all the images are lost.  Well, not lost, but they are not included in the export.  They have to be added back into the exported document.  This is OK if you have 1 or 2 images to deal with, but in the case of a large document with a hundred or more images, it becomes quite cumbersome.  There are other issues as well that I have not yet resolved... such as.. .for some reason, the exported ODT file has 4 extra bytes at the beginning of the zip file.  OpenOffice.org cannot open this broken ODT.  The solution.. manually unzip the ODT, and zip it back up again.  I don't know if this problem is due to a bug in the PHP or if it is a problem with the Linux environment that the exporter and Wiki are running on.

This MediaWiki extension comes closest (from what I've seen) to providing the tools needed to do the round trip from OpenOffice.org to MediaWiki and back to OpenOffice.org.... but it's not quite there.  It needs a better user interface for one thing... it needs to be integrated into the Wiki itself, not tacked on as a "Special page".  It should be easy for readers to select multiple pages or entire Wiki books to be exported.  The export should also include the images that are used in each Wiki page.

Someone with a little XML knowledge.. someone who knows their way around PHP could probably fix this extension up,  add a little to it, and produce a really useful extension to MediaWiki.  Any volunteers?