[Mediawiki-l] User Groups

Tue Jun 29 22:35:15 UTC 2004

Hi all,

Apologies for asking about something that is un-Wiki-ish, and maybe a 
FAQ (but I couldn't find answers in the archives).

I need a "collaborative publication site". I.e. there's a group of 
(non-tech) people who want to collaboratively write a series of texts, 
and they want the texts to be readable as they are being created and edited.
The writers actually form several groups, each of which is working on 
one set of pages (people may be members of more than one group, and 
pages may be writable for more than one group, i.e. there's no clear 
hierarchical structure).
Finally, there's demand for "strictly internal" scratch pads, i.e. pages 
that aren't even readable unless you're logged in as a member of a 
specific group.

My idea was to have "user groups" in the wiki, and a per-page list of 
groups that may read or write it.

The docs were of limited help. A remark somewhere in them reads "it's 
possible to do your own permission scheme", but I found nothing that 
supported that claim. In fact all the permission stuff that's in 
Mediawiki seems to be hardcoded, at least a few quick greps indicated so.

My questions are:
How do I go ahead?
Are there better ways to achieve what we want?

I'm willing to do (limited) PHP coding, and I can change the database 
schema at a whim.
(My primary profession is that of a software engineer, in case you 
wonder ;-)... )

Regards,
Jo