MediaWiki isn't designed with granular per-namespace, per-category, per-article, etc permissions in mind. Content in MediaWiki is either all open, or all closed (in a general sense). There are patches out there that restrict access to certain pages, however, there are numerous ways to circumvent these, including many 3rd party extensions. If you are trying to restrict content, I recommend another wiki engine that was designed with permissions management in mind.
The simplest way to securely protect content in MediaWiki is to set up multiple MediaWiki instances with a shared user and groups table. You can configure each wiki to only allow certain groups to access content.
On 10/13/06, Frederich, Eric P2173 eric.frederich@siemens.com wrote:
Well, the inevitable has happened. Management wants to put stuff in our Wiki which they only want a select group of people to have access to read or edit.
What is the best way to go about this? I have MediaWiki 1.7.1 installed.
I don't have the requirements right now but I'm guessing they'll want the following...
Multiple groups of people. Certain pages where you have to be with a specific group to view a page. Certain pages where you have to be with a specific group to edit a page.
This may be used for a things such as official processes where only the process owner should be allowed to edit the article.
Also, I see something happening where another department (we just gave permission for another department to use our Wiki) will want a bunch of articles available only to engineers in that department. For example, say 30 engineers and a couple hundred articles with proprietary information on design philosophies. For this is it possible to use a separate namespace? Can you restrict a namespace to only being read by a group of people?
Are these kind of restrictions search safe in that if a page is restricted to a certain group and someone outside that group searches the Wiki he/she won't get any results from restricted pages where it would give a couple sentence preview?
Thanks in advance, ~Eric _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l