[Mediawiki-l] Twisting the use of namespaces

[Stéphane Mader]

Hi all

I'm working for a management school, and we want to have groups of students
work together on a common assignment, elaborating and defining a set of
related subjects and concepts.

Students will share and elaborate their work using a wiki. This wiki is
meant to be isolated during the time of assignment (searching should only
yield results from the assignment wiki, editing and so forth should only be
possible by users of the assignment working on that wiki, etc).

The final version of their work could be fed into a common wiki and used by
other students for further assignments or general use.

Groups of students only exist during the time of an assignment and
throughout the year several assignments involving different student groups
will live and then disappear.

In this context, creating a database for each assignment/group definitely
doesn't seem to be the good solution.
I've had a look at custom namespaces and it seems i could use them to
materialize a temporary space for a group of students. I understand that
namespaces are intended to segregate different types of content that may
exist under the same title, so to some extent this is somewhat twisting the
namespace concept but they seem to be the closest fit for the
group/assignment idea.

Obviously we're looking for a solution where the customization we will be
adding will be compatible with future mediawiki releases. It seems to me
that integrating the namespace permission extension and working with the
custom namespace manager will get me where i want.

I'll need to develop a few "back office" features to manage
assignments/users (namespaces/groups) making it easy to create/remove a
namespace, associate/remove students to/from that namespace.

I'm just starting to get into the internals of mediawiki, so i hope i'm not
missing some essentials here.
We are going to start developing this group/assignment feature making it an
extension.

I wanted to know if anyone has some thoughts on the namespace direction ?

Thanks

Stéphane