Wiki restriction in progress

The wiki came under discussion in today’s seminar. As such, it is offline until such a time as I can come up with a robust way to restrict access to seminar notes, while leaving all the material that I have been producing myself available.

Ideally, I would like to either make specific pages of the wiki require a password to access or, alternatively, restrict certain pages to specific user accounts. If anyone knows how to do this elegantly, please let me know.

I expect that I should have my portions available again by Monday. If you care to report any bugs on the blog between now and then, feel free to do so as a comment to this post.

[Update: 4:30pm] Much more quickly than expected, I have been able to establish a content management system for the wiki that allows certain pages to be restricted from public access. This treatment has now been applied to seminar notes from the thesis seminar and the Developing World seminar. It has not been applied to my reading notes, notes related to public lectures, or other such pages. As with any such change (one that requires me to edit PHP script and MySQL database settings), please report any bugs that you encounter.

Once again, I must say that I am impressed with MediaWiki as a platform. All I did was backup the MySQL database and the /images/ folder, erase the old install (except for LocalSettings.php), install a patched version of MediaWiki, run the installer, throw out the config file it generated, add the restriction patch code to the old config file, and then configure user accounts to have access to restriction features. That may sound very tricky to a lot of people, but it was actually a breeze. The whole thing was done in half an hour, with no hiccups discovered so far. Now that it is publicly known, the Lecture and Seminar Notes section of the wiki has graduated out of the experimental grouping.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here. View all posts by Milan