[pmwiki-users] RFC: Site-Admin group

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Based on responses in another thread [1], I'm of the opinion
that things will be much easier in the long run if we create
a separate "Site-Admin" group to hold strictly administrative
pages.  The "Site" group would then be used to hold pages that
are generally shared throughout a site.

The biggest difference between the two groups is that Site-Admin 
would be read-restricted to admins by default, while Site would 
be generally open for reading by default.

As a result, the following pages in the core distribution would
move into the Site-Admin group:

    Site.AuthUser      --> Site-Admin.AuthUser
    Site.AuthList      --> Site-Admin.AuthList
    Site.ApprovedUrls  --> Site-Admin.ApprovedUrls
    Site.Blocklist     --> Site-Admin.Blocklist
    Site.InterMap      --> Site-Admin.InterMap
    Site.NotifyList    --> Site-Admin.NotifyList

There are a few issues to be resolved before making this
switch.  First, if anyone objects to the idea of a new
Site-Admin group, then now would be a good time to register
the objection.  :-)

Second is the question of what to call the new group.  Here I've
suggested "Site-Admin", based on a recommendation from Kathryn 
Andersen (the hyphenated name might have some application for 
the Cluster recipe).  If it weren't for Cluster, I'd probably
choose "SiteAdmin" as being the more likely name -- it's more
consistent with other PmWiki names.

Third is the issue of migration.  If adopted, we would undoubtedly
end up with a $SiteAdmin variable that identifies the group for
Site-Admin pages, analogous to the way the $SiteGroup variable
works for Site pages.

An administrator that wants to continue to use 'Site.*' for
all of the above pages can simply set $SiteAdmin to 'Site' and
everything will work as before.

But for existing sites that want to use the new approach,
we need to have a migration path of some sort.  There are
several aspects to this: (1) making it absolutely clear that 
things have changed in the new release, (2) helping admins
move existing pages to their new locations, or (3) have PmWiki
continue to work with pages in the old Site.* locations.

After thinking about (3) a bit, I'd prefer that by default 
PmWiki _not_ automatically look in the old locations for 
administrative pages.  Moving the key administrative pages
to a separate Site-Admin group means that it's somewhat safer
to open the Site group up to editing (for sites that want to
do that), but we lose that safety if PmWiki is also looking
in the Site group for administrative pages by default.

So, if that's the case, we need some way to help migrate
existing sites to the new structure.  One approach would be
to have PmWiki issue an error message if a page is found in
its old Site.* location but not the new Site-Admin.* one.  
Doing this is quite a bit trickier than it might seem at first,
because some sites have Site.AuthUser and Site.AuthList pages in
the wikilib.d/ directory, and these aren't automatically removed
by an upgrade.

Any other thoughts or ideas about how we could help administrators
with migration of this sort?

Pm