I am in need of ACL (access control) for mediawiki. I've looked through the docs and mailing list and it seems that mediawiki doesn't have that feature. Am I correct?
If I were to try and implement that feature how hard would it be? Would it be easy to plug in to the current architecture or is this feature something so foreign to mediawiki that integrating it would require a lot of effort?
Oh, and I do realize that ACLs go against the spirit of a wiki. It's just that we would like to use mediawiki internally but some information must not be viewed by certain employees (legal reasons, NDAs, etc ...)
Thanks,
Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:
Oh, and I do realize that ACLs go against the spirit of a wiki. It's just that we would like to use mediawiki internally but some information must not be viewed by certain employees (legal reasons, NDAs, etc ...)
MediaWiki is *not* designed for sensitive data.
I strongly advise you not to attempt to use MediaWiki for material that you are legally obligated to keep private.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
MediaWiki is *not* designed for sensitive data.
I assume this means it is not a simple thing to engineer into MediaWiki then.
I strongly advise you not to attempt to use MediaWiki for material that you are legally obligated to keep private.
Bummer. And as a lead developer I really should heed you advice ...
I've only found one other wiki that purports to support ACLs but it really doesn't look nor seem to be as good (in other respects) to MediaWiki.
Argh ... other than for ACL MediaWiki is perfect for our needs.
Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
I strongly advise you not to attempt to use MediaWiki for material that you are legally obligated to keep private.
Argh ... other than for ACL MediaWiki is perfect for our needs.
If it is for groups of people then why not use http authentication to protect the entire installation. I haven't looked at v1.3.x yet but I can't see why you couldn't have multiple mediawiki installations that share the same user table in one database but store all of their page data in different databases. It has been a month or two since I looked at the database design in detail though.
David
David Ross wrote:
If it is for groups of people then why not use http authentication to protect the entire installation.
It's not just for simply protecting the whole wiki. It's for having groups of people, with some groups able to view some pages while other can't view the same pages.
Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:
David Ross wrote:
If it is for groups of people then why not use http authentication to protect the entire installation.
It's not just for simply protecting the whole wiki. It's for having groups of people, with some groups able to view some pages while other can't view the same pages.
That was why I suggested multiple installations, each one protected by HTTP authentication and a different group or groups.
David
David Ross wrote:
That was why I suggested multiple installations, each one protected by HTTP authentication and a different group or groups.
But would get messy to manage when you have say 100 people divided into 30 groups ... Managing 30 wiki installations (and the .htaccess files) sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen :)
Jc
Jean-Christian Imbeault:
I've only found one other wiki that purports to support ACLs but it really doesn't look nor seem to be as good (in other respects) to MediaWiki.
Have you looked at MoinMoin? http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ http://moin.sourceforge.net/
It supports ACL's and AFAIK it's a very reasonable wiki engine.
Rene Pijlman wrote:
Have you looked at MoinMoin? http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/
It supports ACL's and AFAIK it's a very reasonable wiki engine.
Looks very good! Will give it a try!
Jean-Christian Imbeault:
Rene Pijlman:
Have you looked at MoinMoin? http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/
It supports ACL's and AFAIK it's a very reasonable wiki engine.
Looks very good! Will give it a try!
By the way, here's another list of options: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiChoicetree (see branch "User permissions").
pmWiki may be of interest. http://www.pmwiki.org/
I've been playing with moinmoin, and I find the wiki syntax rather limited, especially the free link syntax. This in a Wikipedia:
[[Two words|with this text]]
cannot be done in moinmoin.
On Aug 12, 2004, at 1:20 AM, Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
MediaWiki is *not* designed for sensitive data.
I assume this means it is not a simple thing to engineer into MediaWiki then.
I strongly advise you not to attempt to use MediaWiki for material that you are legally obligated to keep private.
Bummer. And as a lead developer I really should heed you advice ...
I've only found one other wiki that purports to support ACLs but it really doesn't look nor seem to be as good (in other respects) to MediaWiki.
Argh ... other than for ACL MediaWiki is perfect for our needs.
That said, there's a whitelist scheme here. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Setting_user_rights_in_MediaWiki#Configuring_access_restrictions_to_your _wiki
I found this was hard to maintain if you had more public pages than private, so I coded up a small patch to do blacklisting. Apply this against the latest cvs.
http://brainscat.com/archives/2004/08/10/blacklist-pages-in-mediawiki
It works just like the whitelist feature except that if something is blacklisted AND whitelisted, the page will act as if it's blacklisted.
Best, ~Tor
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