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How about adding ACL? So that you can control which users are allowed to read, write certain pages. The moinmoin wiki has that, and it is something, that I think is very valuable.

ikiwiki currently has only the most rudimentary access controls: pages can be locked, or unlocked and only the admin can edit locked pages. That could certianly be expanded on, although it's not an area that I have an overwhelming desire to work on myself right now. Patches appreciated and I'll be happy to point you in the right directions.. --[[Joey]]

I'm really curious how you'd suggest implementing ACLs on reading a page. It seems to me the only way you could do it is .htaccess DenyAll or something, and then route all page views through ikiwiki.cgi. Am I missing something? --[[Ethan]]

Or you could just use apache or whatever and set up the access controls there. Of course, that wouldn't integrate very well with the wiki, unless perhaps you decided to use http basic authentication and the httpauth plugin for ikiwiki that integrates with that.. --[[Joey]]

Which would rule out openid, or other fun forms of auth. And routing all access through the CGI sort of defeats the purpose of ikiwiki. --[[Ethan]]

Also see [[!debbug 443346]].

Just a few quick thoughts about this:

  • I'm only thinking about write ACLs. As Joey noted, read ACLs need to be done in the web server.
  • ACLs are going to be really hard for people with direct access to the revision control system. Which means that we really only need to define ACLs for web access.
  • ACLs for web access can then be defined by the web master. These might not need to be defined in the wiki pages (although they could be).
  • Given the previous two points, can't this be done with the match_user() function defined by the [[plugins/attachment]] plugin (see the [[ikiwiki/pagespec/attachment]] pagespec info) and the [[plugins/lockedit]] plugin (see [[page_locking]])?

For example, add the following to your config file:

locked_pages => '!(user(john) and */Discussion) and *',

would lock all pages unless you're john and editing a Discussion page. It's a thought anyway :-). -- [[Will]]

Yes, writing per-user commit ACLs has become somewhat easier with recent features. Breaking match_user out of attachment, and making the lockedit plugin passuser and ip params when it calls pagespec_match would be sufficient. --[[Joey]]

I am considering giving this a try, implementing it as a module. Here is how I see it:

  • a new preprocessor directive allows to define ACL entries providing permissions for a given (user, page, operation), as in:

    Each would expand to a description of the resulting rule.

  • a configurable page of the wiki would be used as an ACL list. Possibly could refer to other ACL pages, as in: