[pmwiki-users] password 'override' order

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Sun Mar 20 09:34:04 CST 2005


On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 12:19:11PM -0500, jf at tap3x.net wrote:
> I'm new at pmWiki, so please bear with me. I've set up a pmWiki 
> site, and everything seems to be working well. But I am confused 
> about how the various types of passwords work with respect to each 
> other. 

Yeah, passwords are confusing.

> I have set an adminpass, and also set grouppass1, and pagepass1 
> for page1 and the group (group1) that it is in. Therefore, with 
> adminpass, I am permitted to edit page1, and with pagepass1 I can 
> also get into edit page1. But with grouppass1, I cannot. Is this how 
> things work, or have I done something wrong?

This is how things work.  PmWiki comes at this from a different
direction than the one you've described; I tend to think of a 
group password as being shared by many authors, with per-page passwords 
being used to protected pages in the group from those who know the
group password.  Since PmWiki is about collaborative editing of websites,
I tend to think of authors as working on a shared set of pages as opposed
to individual pages.

> What I want to be able to do, in other words, is the following:
> 1) allow certain people in to edit certain pages (using the respective 
> pagepass for each page); 2) edit anything I want, and set attributes 
> using adminpass; and 3) give one person in each group (to whom I 
> don't want to give the adminpass) one group password - the 
> respective grouppass for her/his group - which will allow her/him all 
> the pages in that group with one password. Is that possible?

Well, you'll find that with PmWiki almost anything is possible via
local customizations.  But PmWiki's default setup supports #1 and #2
above, but not #3 (per-group "admin" passwords).  I don't know the
precise details of how you're wanting to use PmWiki here, but my
experience has been that it's far easier to set one shared group 
password that protects all of the pages in the group (as opposed to
setting the same per-page password on a lot of individual pages, which
can get tedious for large groups), and then use the per-page passwords 
to protect selected pages from the authors who know the per-group password.
Of course, this does assume that authors who have the shared per-group 
password can indeed work cooperatively on the group pages (and not
against each other), but this assumption appears to be true in the
vast majority of cases.  And if there are authors who cannot work
together, perhaps the pages belong in separate WikiGroups anyway.

Anyway, does this help at all?  If after reading the above you 
still feel a "group admin" password would be more appropriate, I'll
come up with something relatively quickly.

Pm



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