WoWHead does offer a bit of an API, much like the armory. You can access item data in XML by simply adding &xml to the end of an item url. Example:

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=amani+divining+staff&xml

or

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33494&xml

Item IDs are easy to come by, or guess. You could write a loop from 1 to 1000000 and load every valid item...ignoring the errors.

Secondly, WoWHead seems to be pretty open to sharing data. Case in point, www.emmerald.net. He has been using WoWHead provided data to parse out the best possible upgrades for Feral Druids. I believe all he did was ask nicely.

Furthermore, the Rawr application uses data from the Armory and WoWHead to provide and parse upgrades for a wide array of classes/specs.

The driving force of these sites is the data, that is the draw. Thottbott and WoWhead were the same thing, WoWHead became more popular because the way that data was presented, the actual data remained consistent between the two. Then, WoWHead began to offer other features, like a talent calculator (I know, it came before the data...), item comparisons, etc..

The data is already out there, available in very digestible formats for any decent framework or programmer to consume.

I'm guessing he is specifically referring to a out of the box OSS LAMP solution to allow anybody to create a WoWHead clone. This is a fair idea, but like anything else, is it really necessary?

Software is created to, among other things, fill a gap. That gap could range anywhere from missing features, to the entire package itself. Would an OSS solution be providing anything different, besides an on-demand WoW database?

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