[pmwiki-users] restricting edits?

[Tegan Dowling]

On 8/31/07, Chris Carter <ccarter at lbcc.edu> wrote:
>
> Q. I don't know if this is a technical issue or a site management issue.
> I'm spending lots of time creating pages with links, fonts, outlines, page
> sections, etc. that look just right. Is there any way to password protect
> (or otherwise restrict) edits on my original text/formatting?  I just want
> people to be able to add information below each heading/section, without the
> ability to mess up my formatting.

Depending on what-all you are pre-setting, maybe some of it could go
into a group's GroupHeader or GroupFooter.  Even if the content can't,
probably some of the formatting could.  If you have clusters of
formatting rules that you frequently apply in combination together,
you could create a WikiStyle to cover each cluster.

To give a too-simple example,  create %chris1% to mean the same as
%align=center color=blue bgcolor=yellow% -- people probably wouldn't
be as likely to remove the whole, 'mysterious' style %chris1% as they
would to alter some element of the full, spelled-out style.

Another option would be to create some an edit-protected boilerplate
page, containing sections of formatted material, then on the pages
where your co-authors work instead of actually placing your material,
include it via (:include BoilerplatePage#section1#section1end#:) .

Another option would stand that last one on its head, and instead of
including your material, include the contributed material.  Each
section of content that the co-authors are permitted to edit is
actually an included separate page, and on your own, edit-protected
page, you provide links to those included editable pages.

There are most certainly other, more sophisticated options -- these
are the ones I could do without any coding help, with just the recipes
I ordinarily use -- I hope someone else will have more suggestions for
you.

> If there is no technical solution, does
> one have to just monitor page edits on a daily basis?

That's what I do.  I use Notify rules in my config.php files to have
emails sent to me (regardless of what happens on the Site/NotifyList
pages regarding notifications sent to the users).  In fact, I get an
email for nearly every edit. Since I have a filter rule set up in my
gmail inbox, applying a "WikiWatch" label to all such messages and
having them by-pass the inbox, and since gmail by default combines
multiple, same-subject messages into single, multithread
message-items, this does not produce the overwhelming flood of email
that one might fear.