After Internet Librarian, ricklibrarian was jazzed up about using a wiki for an internal knowledge base. I should have called him “wiklibrarian.” So, last night I installed Mediawiki on the TFML website. I’ve done a few installs of Mediawiki which made this one fast and smooth.
What did, however, take a little bit of searching and a little bit of time was to find what I needed to add to LocalSettings.php to secure the site. Here’s what needed to be done, in order of security strength:
- Only registered users can comment
- Only registered users can see the wiki
- No non-user can register to be a user
This will allow for staff to post freely, and will keep the library’s internal business internal. To perhaps save you all some time, I’ll list here the code I added to LocalSettings.php to achieve the above results. This will give you a private wiki without having to mess with .htaccess or other authentication. Yay. Note: If you prevent user registration, you’ll have to pre-register people and give them usernames and passwords.
## stuff i'm adding (ADS)
# This snippet prevents editing from anonymous users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
# This lists ages anonymous (not-logged-in) users may see (only the log-in)
$wgWhitelistRead = array("Special:Userlogin", "-", "MediaWiki:Monobook.css" );
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;
# This snippet prevents anonymous users registering
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
For the sake of transparency, a case could be made for having this wiki’s content open for all to see. In fact, I’m sure library users would enjoy browsing some of the sections like “Staff Recipes,” and “Sure fire books” in the YA section, but it might be best to start with it protected. If the content turns out to have any utility for the public, perhaps we could move to protecting only specific pages.
