[Pmwiki-users] permissions on groups and limiting visibility

[Kevin Koym]

I am just looking over and working with a new install of pmwiki (i have 
several old installs, but never got this fancy before...  ;-))

I am wondering how do I make sure that certain areas are not searched 
when someone is looking around in the wiki?

I have seen this:

$SearchExcludePatterns[] = '/\\.(All)?RecentChanges$/';

What I am wanting to do is:

1.  Allow searches to happen in the Main group.  RecentChanges is not 
searchable
2.  Allow searches to not enter into the Support group unless the person 
has authenticated (preferably no visibility into the pages, much less 
access to support unless the person has logged in)
3.  Only allow editing to be done by a smaller group of people

I think that I have the editing piece down. I have found the search 
exclude patterns.  I do not know how to exclude several groups using 
regular expressions.  (i know that it must be a |, but I have not 
figured out how to write it right yet...)

So my questions-
1.  How do I write a regex that will work for SearchExcludePatterns?  
How do I get rid of this for people who have authenticated into the 
Support wiki group?
2.  Is there a way to have username and password be required (versus 
just passwords?)  Is it possible that this could be a file that another, 
unrelated process produces?

Am I thinking about this wrong? 

Thanks,
Kevin