You have very specific questions and all in one thread? It seem that you comming from a commercial wiki and want the same funktionality here. No offence, just my thoughts.
Vincent:1156886329 wrote
Search:
Can search be made relative to a namespace/directory, eg "parts:amplifier", "animals:tortoise" ?
Can the search mechanism be extended easily to handle synonyms (given in some user extensible table say)?
Is there a third party search mechanism one could use instead ?
The search is currently under development (as the many more other things too ;) ) ask the mailing list. I dont have seen any aproaches of using external search engines. If you like, feel free to implement. :)
Side-tools:
Can I write server side scripts in another language and have them interact with user inputs in DW-forms,
and feed output back to DW; how easy is it to do that ?
The reason I am asking is that, since the file structure is open and Unix-like, it seems a lot easier than going through an SQL interface.
This is also not a simple user question (my opinion), ask the mailing list here too, but never seen such a thing (doesnt say very much...).
Composition:
Is it possible to have a client-side sub-wiki that functions as an "overlay", a kind of vertical composition.
Likewise is it possible to horizontal composition, where two wikis on the server side are interaccessible but
use different visual architectures, layouts, colors, typeface, etc
What do you want to do with this? Such a thing like frontend and backend server? Atm you have to write clustering things yourself and donate them. ;)
Sry that I cant really help you.
BlackFog