You can block the people from editing every page, with the following lines in LocalSettings.php:

$wgGroupPermissions["*"]["edit"] = false; $wgGroupPermissions["user"]["edit"] = false; $wgGroupPermissions["sysop"]["edit"] = false;

However it will also stop people from editing talk pages.

You also can block the user creations, so users won't be able to register at all (except with permission by you), and anonymous users won't be able to edit:

$wgGroupPermissions["*"]["edit"] = false; $wgGroupPermissions["*"]["createaccount"] = false;

Again, it will stop them from editing talk pages.

However, there are two more permissions - "createpage" and "createtalk" - which are seperated. You can ask in Bugzilla to add seperate permissions - "editpage" and "edittalk" - for this purpose. You can also develop it in your code.

As for the "lock database" of the developers: as far as I understand, there is no developer permission in the downloaded MediaWiki (it's an extension, I think, and so is the permission to lock databases), and the "lock database" affects talk pages as well as content pages.

rotemliss

Garrett Baumgartner wrote:

How do I protect the database in Mediawiki such that people in the Sysop group can edit the database normally, but regular users can only edit Talk pages? Would this involve somehow protecting specific namespaces (e.g., everything except Talk)? Is it even possible? I don't want the database to be editable by just anyone off the internet but I do want it to be editable to anyone I trust enough to give sysopness.

Also, what precisely does the dev-level "lock database" do? Can the person with developer permissions still edit the database? Are the talk pages unaffected? I can't check because it didn't ask me to set up a dev account when I installed it (it did give me a bureaucrat / sysop though). I am looking at the table in PhpMyAdmin and the rows my default account has are:

1 bureaucrat 1 sysop

I tried adding another row for user 1 with the user group "developer" but that didn't work. I renamed it to "dev" and that didn't work either. What group is it?

Thanks.

• Garrett

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On 05/04/06, Garrett Baumgartner baumgarg@hotmail.com wrote:

How do I protect the database in Mediawiki such that people in the Sysop group can edit the database normally, but regular users can only edit Talk pages? Would this involve somehow protecting specific namespaces (e.g., everything except Talk)? Is it even possible?

No. MediaWiki doesn't contain this sort of access control. You could hack this in, however.

Also, what precisely does the dev-level "lock database" do?

Prevents writes to the database.

Rob Church