Hi, I really like mediawiki, but there's one thing I cannot do easily, it seems, so I'm looking for advice. I need to be able to partition the collection of pages into areas that are private and semi-private and public. I know there are a variety of access control extensions, but they all seem rather complex compared to how, say, foswiki, handles it. I know about namespaces, and categories, and subpages, but they all seem like so much more work than just setting up "webs" in foswiki. I need to provide "private" areas where only individuals can get access; I also need to separate content into a few large collections that won't overlap by default. No matter whether I consider namespaces, or categories, or subpages, there's always a lot of extra work needed to ensure new pages are properly named or categorized. The names of the pages themselves seem to get longer than I want, because of specifying namespace or parent-page names; or I have to ensure my user community always puts in the right categories, which is a burden on them. There are serious advantages to using mediawiki, but this partitioning thing is a dealbreaker. And many of the extensions seem to require more hand-holding than I really want to provide.
So, given this, does anyone have any advice for me?
Cheers. Fil Salustri
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:13 AM, Filippo A. Salustri salustri@ryerson.cawrote:
Hi, I really like mediawiki, but there's one thing I cannot do easily, it seems, so I'm looking for advice. I need to be able to partition the collection of pages into areas that are private and semi-private and public. I know there are a variety of access control extensions, but they all seem rather complex compared to how, say, foswiki, handles it. I know about namespaces, and categories, and subpages, but they all seem like so much more work than just setting up "webs" in foswiki. I need to provide "private" areas where only individuals can get access; I also need to separate content into a few large collections that won't overlap by default. No matter whether I consider namespaces, or categories, or subpages, there's always a lot of extra work needed to ensure new pages are properly named or categorized. The names of the pages themselves seem to get longer than I want, because of specifying namespace or parent-page names; or I have to ensure my user community always puts in the right categories, which is a burden on them. There are serious advantages to using mediawiki, but this partitioning thing is a dealbreaker. And many of the extensions seem to require more hand-holding than I really want to provide.
So, given this, does anyone have any advice for me?
Cheers. Fil Salustri
-- Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng. Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Ryerson University 350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749 Fax: 416/979-5265 Email: salustri@ryerson.ca http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/ http://deseng.ryerson.ca/%7Efil/
The only correctly implemented access control extension I know of is the Halo Access Control List, which has a couple of large prerequisites. The rest are likely insecure.
Your best bet if you want to keep things light weight is to use apache http auth and create multiple wikis that are each protected by different passwords, or public as required.
On 4 June 2010 16:16, Brian J Mingus Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Your best bet if you want to keep things light weight is to use apache http auth and create multiple wikis that are each protected by different passwords, or public as required.
Notably, this is the way WMF itself does it: the unit of privacy is the wiki, not the individual page on a wiki.
- d.
I understand about not fractioning down to individual pages, and that's perfectly sensible. I'm thinking of "collections" of pages that logically are pertinent to a subset of a user community. Cheers. Fil
On 4 June 2010 13:00, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 4 June 2010 16:16, Brian J Mingus Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Your best bet if you want to keep things light weight is to use apache
http
auth and create multiple wikis that are each protected by different passwords, or public as required.
Notably, this is the way WMF itself does it: the unit of privacy is the wiki, not the individual page on a wiki.
- d.
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Filippo A. Salustri wrote:
I understand about not fractioning down to individual pages, and that's perfectly sensible. I'm thinking of "collections" of pages that logically are pertinent to a subset of a user community. Cheers. Fil
Your requisites are quite vague, but creating several wikis may solve what you call "creating webs". You can share the user table so the users only need to register once.
Brian: I think Lockdown is secure (although it's per namespace, not per page).
Thanks. I'll take it under advisement. Simply put, I'd prefer to have certain collections of pages that I can control both the visibility and the editability. Cheers. Fil
On 4 June 2010 17:54, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Filippo A. Salustri wrote:
I understand about not fractioning down to individual pages, and that's perfectly sensible. I'm thinking of "collections" of pages that
logically
are pertinent to a subset of a user community. Cheers. Fil
Your requisites are quite vague, but creating several wikis may solve what you call "creating webs". You can share the user table so the users only need to register once.
Brian: I think Lockdown is secure (although it's per namespace, not per page).
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Filippo A. Salustri salustri@ryerson.ca wrote:
Thanks. I'll take it under advisement. Simply put, I'd prefer to have certain collections of pages that I can control both the visibility and the editability. Cheers. Fil
Then I'd suggest not mediawiki. While extensions may or may not be secure, mediawiki in itself was not designed for fine grained access control so there are no guarantees that your data will be secure, or that the functionality wont be broken in subsequent releases.
Yeah, that's the sense I'm getting too. Too bad, really, cuz it's without a doubt the most polished of all the wikis I've looked at (and I've looked at LOTS). Cheers. Fil
On 4 June 2010 18:10, OQ overlordq@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Filippo A. Salustri salustri@ryerson.ca wrote:
Thanks. I'll take it under advisement. Simply put, I'd prefer to have certain collections of pages that I can control both the visibility and the editability. Cheers. Fil
Then I'd suggest not mediawiki. While extensions may or may not be secure, mediawiki in itself was not designed for fine grained access control so there are no guarantees that your data will be secure, or that the functionality wont be broken in subsequent releases.
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