Santosh Krishnan wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I've used an older version of MediaWiki and I've seen how powerful it can be. I have a few questions, which I've been unable to answer and am hoping that you can do so.

My concerns are chiefly around security and user access.

Since I'm not trying to use it to create a user editable Wiki, I would want to disallow the general user to be able to create any content within the deployed implementation. I would want only my designated personnel to create and maintain documents within it. I don't know if it's possible to restrict it on this level.

It's quite easy if done in an all-of-nothing fashion. You could for instance forbid anoynmous users to edit or create accounts. Or in your case, allow editing just for those in a given group.

Second, I wouldn't want it to look like Wikipedia, and specifically, I would want it to have a visual look and feel in line with the remainder of my website. I know that we can implement skins on MediaWiki, but I don't know how versatile it is.

It can be done. It mosly depends on how versatile is the guy you have creating your skin.

Third, I would want to be able to restrict certain pages from being viewed without someone having logged in (and I would want those user IDs to be controlled by my personnel so that only if one of my guys provides a user ID will that page be accessible - meaning that perhaps we have private information and we must first validate that the person who wishes to view it is first vetted by my team and then my team member will create a user ID for that person). Is this possible?

It's easy to only let your team to create accounts. It's also easy to restrict the whole wiki so that it is only viewable for registered users (with the ability to except a handful of pages).

If you want to make it so that some pages can only be viewed by some users, and several of them they unable to view each others private pages, then MediaWiki has no support for that. You need to enter into the world of security extensions. Doesn't look hard, but there's always the case that it doesn't take into account some loophole through which it's possible to access that kind of page which you were not supposed to.