[Mediawiki-l] User / Group Access

[Frederich, Eric P2173]

Well, the inevitable has happened.  Management wants to put stuff in our
Wiki which they only want a select group of people to have access to
read or edit.

What is the best way to go about this?  I have MediaWiki 1.7.1
installed.

I don't have the requirements right now but I'm guessing they'll want
the following...

Multiple groups of people.
Certain pages where you have to be with a specific group to view a page.
Certain pages where you have to be with a specific group to edit a page.

This may be used for a things such as official processes where only the
process owner should be allowed to edit the article.

Also, I see something happening where another department (we just gave
permission for another department to use our Wiki) will want a bunch of
articles available only to engineers in that department.  For example,
say 30 engineers and a couple hundred articles with proprietary
information on design philosophies.  For this is it possible to use a
separate namespace?  Can you restrict a namespace to only being read by
a group of people?

Are these kind of restrictions search safe in that if a page is
restricted to a certain group and someone outside that group searches
the Wiki he/she won't get any results from restricted pages where it
would give a couple sentence preview?

Thanks in advance,
~Eric