Sunday, May 15, 2011

ISO ACLs for Wiki; considering Drupal

I have long wanted ACLs for wikis, both at companies like Intel and AMD, and on comp-arch.net.

I punted ion this when I set up comp-arch.net, with the semipublic and public areas. Abandoning the public areas when I got spammed.

But now my need is growing again. I am wiki'ing things that may get patented, so they cannot be initially public --- but it is too much hassle to write them up privately, and then later post to a wiki, a year or so later when the patent is published. I want to write them up in the wiki once, and then have them go public when allowed.

Setting up a private wiki is a pain, because wikidmin wants to be shared. It's a pain to have to propagate changes made to a template on a public wiki to a private wiki, and vice versa.

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This became annoying enough today that I considered switching to a CMS like Drupal or Joomla, from mediawiki.

Transferring the mediawiki content will be a hassle.

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I''m starting to dream of a file based wiki. Each wiki page, or attachment, living in a filesystem. OS filesystem security and ACLs. Webdav if appropriate. Wikiserver running as OS user accounts - requiring setuid CGI scripts or the equivalent.

The content files being separate from the wiki web presentation engine. E.g. one might have a CMS-like web system, or a wiki system, that interpret the files separately. In which case changing the CMS/wiki engine is just changing the scripts.

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