[pmwiki-users] Read-protecting Site.*

[Tegan Dowling]

On 4/12/07, Ben Wilson <dausha at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/12/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> [...]
>
> > Administrators often want to restrict browse access to pages
> > in the Site.* group.  The natural (and obvious) approach is
> > to place a read password on Site.GroupAttributes, but that's
> > often problematic because some pages in Site.* need read
> > access in order to work properly.  These pages include:
> >
> [...]
> >
> > So, I'm thinking that perhaps the cleanest approach would be
> > to add special read passwords (similar to '@nopass') to the above
> > so that they can be accessed even when the Site group is
> > read protected.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> Funny you should mention that. I just deployed a wiki that is private
> except for Main.*, and had to go to just those pages to @nopass. If I
> had any influence with the wonderful development effort of PmWiki
> (waves two pennies seductively) I would suggest @nopass by default for
> those site pages. :-)
>
> In the alternative, could an administrator set up a list of @nopass
> pages in local/config.php? That could prevent somebody from
> accidentally restricting critical pages.

Taking another step slightly sideways:  Several of these are pages
that no one but administrators ever need to actually browse.  The wiki
itself needs access to them in order to perform some functions on
behalf of non-admin or even non-passworded users of the site, but
neither those users nor the wiki actually **browses** the pages.
Could there be another passwordable attribute "access" or something
like that?