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.