[Pmwiki-users] Publishing a part of your wiki -- Experience using PmWiki

John Rankin john.rankin
Wed Sep 15 16:06:25 CDT 2004


On Wednesday, 15 September 2004 6:13 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
>How can you let other people see only some of your wiki pages, without 
>letting them see too much?
>...
>
>Ideally I would like to be able to create a separate "public" wiki that I
>give outsiders access to, via some password. This wiki should only show a
>subset of the pages in the main wiki, but it can definitely not show the
>same sidebar (that would reveal too much). It may also be important that
>changes cannot propagate from this wiki to the original pages -- I'm
>ambivalent to allowing outsiders to edit pages in the "public" wiki, but
>there might be occasions when it is desirable.
>
>As for links in the "public" wiki, I think that links going to pages that
>have not been made public should optionally not be shown as links. A
>consequence of this is that the public wiki shouldn't be able to show the
>source of pages -- this could otherwise reveal more than you want. Is the
>source directive password protected?
>
>/Christian
>
>-- 
As I understand it, some web content management systems have the concept
of public and private pages, so that a set of pages can be reviewed and
approved inside an organisation, then be released to the wider world.
You can also quickly make private a public page that is found to be
incorrect or embarassing.

Conceptually, this could be achieved in a wiki with a checkbox on the
edit screen:

    [ ] Public

or

    [ ] Private

depending on what you want the default behaviour to be. I'd suggest that
in your case it should require a positive action (tick the box) to
release a page to the public.

To implement this would require something like:

- a place to define a list of 'private' addresses that are allowed
  to view all pages; if it's a request from a public address to a
  private page, deny access

- a modified page link function that checks whether a page is
  public or private; if it's a reference to a private page from
  a public page, display the link text only

Of course, access to a public page might still require a password.

I *think* this would be fairly easy to do in PmWiki 2.

No doubt there are other ways, but this is the simplest scheme I
could think of. Hope it helps.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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