[wikka-community] Page Groups in Wikka?

[th yelton]

My name is Thomas and I am new to this mailing list and to Wikka.  I 
administer a number of websites including one for my church 
(fpsudbury.org) that currently uses the Usemod wiki platform for most of 
its pages (not the home page).  We've outgrown what Usemod can do for us 
and are looking for a replacement.  In particular it needs a user 
login/permission system that lets us separate public pages from 
private.  Looking a little ahead I also see a need to subdivide portions 
of the private side into page groups that would be accessible only to 
limited groups of members, for example an area devoted to the board of 
trustees.

Wikka handles the public/private division as it comes "out of the box", 
and I found a nice mod (ACLsWithUserGroups) for implementing user groups 
that should do nicely, but I don't see a simple way to create page 
groups to which user groups could be assigned permission to access.  
Individual pages can be restricted to users and user groups but that's 
not quite enough since setting and maintaining ACLs on each individual 
page in a group would be tiresome and error prone and new pages created 
within the group would not automatically get the right ACLs.

So my question:  Is there a way in Wikka to do page groups that I've 
missed?  If not, are there plans to implement page groups? 

I'm also wondering how hard it would be to implement something on my 
own.  What I have in mind would make use of page name prefixes to group 
pages together.  For example page BoardMinutes would inherit its ACLs 
from page Board except where it had its own ACLs set.  Thus changing the 
ACLs of Board would affect Board* and any new BoardSomething page would 
automatically have the right protection.  I'm betting that this would 
not be a large code change but I'd like to hear the opinions of Wikka 
developers.

I have other questions but this will do for a start.  Your input is 
greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Thomas

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.