[pmwiki] Re: [Pmwiki-users] CVS features was: discussion on line breaks

[Bernhard.Weichel@t-online.de]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:26:10AM -0500, Randall wrote:
>> Patrick,
>> 
>>> But if anyone thinks that it is vitally important to go beyond
>>> simple authorship tracking to providing full-fledged user accounts
>>> with passwords, then now would be a good time to make your wishes
>>> known.  
>> 

I would like to point your attention to
http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/Development/TrackAuthorship, in particular

My recent thinking on this is to allow a local customization to specify the
fields that should be saved along with a page, with some fields being
identified as "track by date" (much like the diff: fields are now). Then a
local customization could choose what information should be tracked across
edits. --Pm

In this case I would track:

 * date + time
 * IP
 * author
 * fulltitle
 * commment - allowing the author to briefly describe his changes
 * change level  - indicates "typo" "wording", "minorContent",
"majorContent"
 * state:   "new", "draft", "released"


I would really like to have a full title in addition to the title
which establishes the link.

Obviously these features are useful, when PmWiki is used as CMS ...

>> I'm in the process of setting Pmwiki up on one of my web sites and
>> would probably use full-fledged user accounts if they were available.
>> However, with the ability to password-protect groups of pages, this
>> isn't anything close to a necessity for me.

Full fledged user accounts would be great but I fear also that it is a big
effort. What about a compromise like this:

1. there is a wiki page such as RegisteredUsers in which we have records
like
this:

=user beweiche pmwiki at nospam.weichel21.de "Bernhard Weichel"
$1$9LISstO/$ye56qZLDLYVuaakErsGhR0
=user anonymous pmwiki at nospam.weichel21.de "Anonymous" nopassword
=user anonymous-nomeail nomail "Anonymous" nopassword
[[include:AnotherGroup/RegisteredUsers]]

Obviously the markup should be such that in can queried with optimum
performance.

The page could be on a System level (Main/RegisteredUsers)
or on a Group level (MyGroup/RegisteredUsers). It could also be the
GroupAttributes page ...

2. This page can be itself password protected such that only an
administrator
can maintain it. Later the approach could be extended as needed (user
interface ...).

3. In order to track authorship, this page can be used as a lookup for
valid Author identifications.


4. There are many future options ...
 * The page could also be used as a mailing list for registered users ...
 * The page could be used as a directory for a community in which each
 * user has a homepage (with further Information)
 * multiple RegisteredUsers pages may exist, which then serve as UserGroups
   and can be linked to Groups and Pages by proper attributes
 * the mail adress can also be used to send confirmation mails to an
   author so he gets noticed, when someone edits pages in his name
 * for performance reasons a more complex thing could be cached
 * we can make a cookie or session based login such that the lookup to
   Registered Users happens only once

...


> The two systems would likely be orthogonal to each other--I'm not
> planning to add access control lists (i.e., access to pages based on
> authenticated user id) anytime in the near future.  Thus, user
> accounts would simply
> be used for identification, and possibly to allow per-user
> customization settings, but not for access control to pages or other
> operations.

I really agree on this, in particular for read access. This could really
impose a significant performance degradation.

> Absolutely, almost all PmWiki options are done this way.  It's
> generally easier for me to make them per-group or per-page
> customizable than it
> is to force them to be global.  

But we should have a way to make it global (e.g. using Main Group)

--bernhard
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