Forum .LRN Q&A: XoWiki Howto: Permissions

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Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on
What is the best way to introduce different permissions within a single xowiki instance?

Use cases I am running into locally:

1. N groups within my institution are sharing content within a single instance of xowiki, but some groups do not want everyone to have permission to edit certain documents.

2. Some XoWiki pages are used in LORS learning modules and we do not want someone to edit the content while the learning module is active.

Related Questions:

1. Can different pages or sets of pages have different group permissions?
2. Can a page be locked for admin only editing?

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
in order to provide page-level access rights, one has to use policy3 (see http://alice.wu-wien.ac.at:8000/xowiki-faq/#policies). Then you get on the admin page for every page the option to edit the permissions.

If you go to the page-level permissions, there is more administration work necessary. It is certainly possible to give different permissions to members of different groups.
A different option might be to export the content to separate xowikis (for every group), and to access from lors different xowiki instances. This is less admin work, since one can use package level policies.

what exactly means "while the learning module is active". does it mean that pages used in a course should not be allowed to be altered while the course is running (e.g. for a semester)? Or something different?

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Gustaf,

Wouldn't exporting lead to maintenance issues with the content in multiple xowiki instances?

Besides that it is a pretty simple solution, but it not really accessible to normal users. You'd really need a user interface that would let you copy the content to another xowiki instance the user had write privilege over.

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
Mainentance issue: if the three groups work on different issues, it is pretty clear what to find in which wiki. if an xowiki instance is mounted within another xwiki instances, this looks to the user like three different subfolders. In such a situation, moving from a single wiki to n-wikis is a one-time situation, involving an export and an import - it does not need a programmer. altering the name to a name + folder prefix should be a no-brainer, but i have never used lors and i do not know, what carl uses in detail.

how many groups are there? about how many wiki pages are we talking?

one can certainly think about more clever solutions involving some programming - but for this i would need more detailed knowledge about the situation.

what means "while the learning module is active"?

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Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on
Thanks Gustaf,

Policy 3 sounds like what I was asking for. Will try it out.

Re: How many groups
Right now we have ~5-10 distinct groups using the Wiki with overlap in content. A flat hierarchy makes sense to most people, but we have given some groups their own instances when it is clear they needed them and it has been hard to make it clear in the UI for members of these groups that there are different Wikis with different permissions. This is why I will likely explore page level permissions for future groups with clear labeling of those permissions on the rendered page.

Re: LORS with Wiki integration
We want to be able to lock down a page when it is included in a graded learning module (locking in the same way the wikipedia locks certain articles when they are linked from the front page).