Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

Is there a howto on running MW as a CMS where only a few persons/admins can edit, but others could still create user pages and tweak their display?

/BP

MediaWiki is not a CMS. Now, if you allow everybody to view, restricting editing to a group is easy to do. People can still create accounts and change their settings, if you want them to be able to create a user page for themselves (and only for themselves), you'll probably need to edit a bit of code.