[wikka-community] Page Groups in Wikka?

[Nils Lindenberg]

Hi Thomas and welcome to this wikka mailing list.

On 11/5/07, th yelton <thyml at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.

ACLsWithUserGroups is indeed a nice mod and there is a ticket
(http://wush.net/trac/wikka/ticket/33) and a milestone (1.1.7.1.) to
implement it.

> 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?

You are thinking about something lik
http://wush.net/trac/wikka/ticket/139, right? If you take a look at
the comments there, you will see that wikka has a flat structure and
no namespaces. Therefore inheritance is nor really possible. What is
possible, is mentioned here: http://wush.net/trac/wikka/ticket/189
(Optionally clone ACLs during page cloning) and
http://wikkawiki.org/InheritACL. I am not sure if these possibilities,
together with ACLsWithUserGroups, would be sufficent for you.

> 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.

It is possible,yes. You would have to add page-relations to the
database and modify the ACL-Handling accordingly. Since this would
involve some changed files/tables, it would make upgrading to never
versions more difficult. If you want to code it, I suggest you to open
a page on wikkawiki.org documenting your goals and changes made,
allowing people to dicuss them and help you.

Greets,
Nils Lindenberg