Proceedings:RL1/Slides

This Proceedings page is awaiting attention from one of the Editors.

<Proceedings:RL1

This is a rough outline for the conversation to follow:

next

Authentication plugins

• AuthPlugin interface
• Ryan Lane's LDAP plugin
• OpenID, etc.
• Other work?

next

Granular access control in general

• Quoting Brion's email from November, 2005:

  The main thing is that we (at least I ;) don't want to have to maintain code that's totally useless to us, and a security layer adds maintenance obligations to that useless-to-us code (if there's a hole, we have to patch it and issue new releases, and if it exists people are more likely to want to rely on it, increasing the weight of the obligation). Thus my knee-jerk reaction is [ to suggest forking MediaWiki ]; if somebody wants to maintain such a beast, let them.

  [ Submitting patches to extend the MediaWiki core to allow for a security layer ] is possibly appropriate though; I hacked in the AuthPlugin so people could work on things like the LDAP and other custom authentication interop things separately from the main code, without adding too much to the core code complexity (and others have helped improve it, and it could probably still use improvement ;)

  It might make sense to have a similar access control interface which can then be plugged in, though I'm not sure how much plugging would really need to be done if the infrastructure for all the plug points would actually be there.

next

Read-only access

• Fraught with problems
  • Page transclusion
  • Export hooks
  • Page history
  • Searching
• Even harder: confidential page names

next

External Authorization plugins

• What this means: being able to manage group memberships in external database rather than in internal database
• Not really being done (?)
• How to do it: override User.php?
• Other hooks?

next

New distribution mechanisms

• Debian package for MediaWiki
• RPM (?)
• Does a PEAR distribution make sense?
• Does it make sense to package MediaWiki extensions as .deb/.rpm/PEAR thingies?

next

Structured data in enterprise use

• Wikidata
• Semantic MediaWiki

next

WYSIWYG Editing

• Issue discussed extensively at Hacking Days
• Several non-MediaWiki markup solutions (FCKEditor very popular here)
• Challenge for mainstream solution: lack of formal Wiki-syntax definition

next

Other stuff

• Marking stable/approved versions of articles
• Training