Hello, I have been working for years with a client that has a huge Wiki on the Internet, used primarily as a journalist’s research tool that eventually feeds books they write.
I am a total newbie to MediaWiki/WikiMedia. . .and in the past when the client has needed the site moved or updated, I’ve rustled up a colleague to do it.
Now they are toying with the idea of a paywall. Perhaps some parts of the site would be visible. A few pages of the day as a teaser, etc.
But they’d like to have a membership/paywall a visitor must join to access the pages. And since they are completely non-technical, the simplest, but more importantly, most SECURE is the driving force.
I’ve been poking around web-searching, discovered that using MediaWiki to block pages using “access control" is unadvisable.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AccessControl%EF%BF%BC
Again, not recommended:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619036/mediawiki-payment-gateway%EF%BF%B... MediaWiki payment gateway stackoverflow.com
I’ve seen suggestions of setting up either a Bootstrap html/css page that handles the PayWall—and putting the Wiki in a subdomain and pointing the access to that. I have not tested it.
?--A Wordpress site with the Wiki in a subdomain? There are several membership plugins with Wordpress that I’m familiar with. ?—A Bootstrap or React page and the Wiki Site in a subdomain?
And while I’m always up to learn new things—my experience is as a designer/visual creative with a bent for the web—I know my limitations.
I’m looking for some advice from the MediaWiki community to see what way is best, most secure, and easiest to maintain.
Also, as a sidebar: I’m a neophyte with upgrading. They are needing it and they are on version 1.34.5 I’m worried that if they wait too long to upgrade it will be a monster, as explained by a friend who did the upgrade and said there were so many things that had to be replaced and alternates selected.
Thank you SO much for your time, experience, and advice, Maureen Mead / South Sound Washington State mmeadpond@icloud.com mailto:mmeadpond@icloud.com
On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 13:40:12 -0700 Maureen Mead via MediaWiki-l mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Now they are toying with the idea of a paywall. Perhaps some parts of the site would be visible. A few pages of the day as a teaser, etc.
But they’d like to have a membership/paywall a visitor must join to access the pages. And since they are completely non-technical, the simplest, but more importantly, most SECURE is the driving force.
I'm not aware of any free software MediaWiki extension that implements this, but I can recommend a possible approach you can take about this.
I recommend splitting off the paywalled content to a completely different wiki. As you have discovered, implementing the kind of needed granular access control for something like this to be possible on a single wiki is just a bad idea: MediaWiki wasn't built for this, and every extension that promises to implement this will have some kind of way around your paywall.
So that's why I recommend creating a completely different wiki with the paywalled content. You should setup this new wiki as a private wiki[1]. What I'd do then is setup some kind of site where you can purchase access and have that site automatically create an account for them on this wiki, for example, by adding them to an LDAP group and using the LDAPAuthentication2[2] and LDAPAuthorization[3] extensions or just using the MediaWiki API.
simplest
There's no simple solution to this if using MediaWiki is absolutely required.
version 1.34.5
Please, _please_ upgrade, the longer this is delayed the more painful it will be. I highly recommend checking out the LTS MediaWiki releases[2]. The current LTS is 1.39 although the upcoming 1.43 will also be an LTS.
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Simple_private_wiki [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAPAuthentication2 [3]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAPAuthorization [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle#Release_policy
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