[Mediawiki-l] Twisting the use of namespaces

Tue Aug 1 17:21:30 UTC 2006

I see now that searching is an issue.

But may be it will be cheaper and make more sense to create a special
searching within assignements rather than use existing mechanism with
namespaces? Otherwise you will have to patch the existing searching (see
discussion on NamespacePermissions page); if you implement your own it will
be more usable and friendly I'm sure.

By the way, I can take part in the development gladly, since as I said we
have a similar idea.

2006/8/1, Stéphane Mader <stephane.mader at gmail.com>:
>
> 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
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