interface cobalt

To help keep everyone up-to-date with the work I’m doing on my project, I set up a new wiki for it (a MediaWiki). The idea is that by subscribing to a feed of recent changes, there will usually be no need for emails etc. as notifications of work that has been done.

For now, I don’t want to give everyone either read or write access. That was easily taken care of by adding the following to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

The first two lines (for ‘edit’ and ‘read’) restrict editing and reading to registered users. The last line (for ‘createaccount’) also restricts account creation, to prevent anyone from being able to sign up and get access to the wiki. By default, sysops still have access to account creation: log in as Sysop, go to the Special:Userlogin page, choose to create an account, fill out the details for the user to be given access (except password), and use the by email button. This will send an email to the user containing a URL to the wiki and a temporary password that will allow him or her to log in and set a new password.

Finally, to ensure that feed readers such as Google Reader will still be able to fetch the recent changes feeds, I allow anonymous access to (only) the recent changes page (also in LocalSettings.php):

$wgWhitelistRead = array('Special:Recentchanges');