New subject: [Mediawiki-l] Making only a part of the content visible for a group of users

28 Jan 2010

Hello,

We've recently installed a wiki for IT dept usage but came to the conclusion
that it would be very useful to let end users see some of the articles. The
thing is we don't want them to see all the content mainly because it would
confuse them. For instance, if they search for "Accounting" we want to
provide definitions and troubleshooting on the Accounting system that might
help them, but not every server list, SQL code and tech spec that we have.

We've been looking around and found a couple of options based on namespaces,
which we're still not sure will work the way we need (for one thing,
limiting search results for end users) and seem kind of hard to maintain.

The simplest option seems to be keeping two separate wikis, but I don't want
to disconnect the end users documents from our wiki because it's valuable
info for us too. What we're thinking about is having both wikis but
maintaining them in sync with some batch process that could export and
import all articles that belong to a certain category or even backup and
restore the entire database and afterwards delete non-end user articles.
That way, the end user wiki would be read-only and get updates every day. In
both cases we'd have to know how to deal with images (seems easy with the
backup/restore option but no so much with the export / import).

Do you think we're on the right path with any of these? Any other
suggestions? Here is our version info:

Product Version
MediaWiki 1.15.1
PHP 5.2.10 (isapi)
MySQL 5.0.22

Thank you in advance!!