[Q] CMS/Swiki development

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at netvision.net.il
Tue Mar 4 19:46:34 UTC 2003


Hi Lukas!

Iff you really need security, then it needs to be actually usable. Not
just in types of permissions, also in the scope of permissions granted.
One page passwords are very fine grained (easy to forget to add a
password to a new page), whole wiki passwords are very coarse grained.
It's important to think about how someone will actually go about
creating an area or group of pages and keep it secured.

Daniel

Lukas Renggli <renggli at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> 
> > I plan to develop a kind of Swiki that is more what I want (nothing 
> > against swiki, but it's not really the thing I want :-) I think the 
> > best  is with commanche.
> 
> I am implementing (with the Software Composition Group at Bern) a new 
> Smalltalk Wiki implementation right now. There should be a first public 
> version within a few weeks.
> 
> If you want to have a look at some documentation browse to: 
> 
> 	http://scgwiki.iam.unibe.ch:8080/SCG/520
> 
> Unfortunately there is no public running prototype yet. Alexander will 
> set-up a server very soon. Most of the needed code is there and working. 
> We have about 150 Test-Cases that are most running green!
> 
> > 1) What would you say is the best starting point (It should 
> > be faster than swiki)?
> > - start from scratch
> > - change the existing swiki
> 
> We considered using either SWiki or WikiWorks as a base, but did not 
> like very much those systems from the design point of view. So we 
> started from scratch.
> 
> > - build with seaside
> 
> In my opinion Seaside is really the best framework for any kind of web-
> application. Unfortunately it is not portable to dialects not supporting 
> continuations (Avi, correct me if I am wrong). And one of our goals was 
> to have a Wiki that is easily portable between dialects.
> 
> > 2) What do you say about regular expressions. Is the plugin build in 
> > in  the default VM or does the admin has to compile a new VM? Then I 
> > had to  use Streams.
> 
> We have a parser building a tree of the content of a page. There are 
> nodes for any kind of entities like paragraphs, lists, per-formatted 
> text, internal and external links, smalltalk-code, ...
> 
> > - pages sit in a tree (swiki has a graph structure)
> 
> Not only the pages are a composite of nodes, also the whole wiki 
> structure is a tree built of a composite. We do not limit to the model 
> of SWiki (Shelf, Book and Pages), we may nest at any deep. As internal 
> links are simply references to another entity, they automatically update 
> when we move something.
> 
> > - userlogin
> > - permissions (from user to admin)
> > - permissions are bound to a user/page combination and are
> >    inherited down the tree.
> 
> A good security framework is really a problem in the current wiki 
> implementations. We have a model that is going to give the possibility 
> to have fine grained security checks: e.g. different permissions to view, 
> edit, add, remove, change, upload pages that might be attached to 
> different groups of users.
> 
> I hope that I could give you a brief overview of what I am doing right 
> now. As soon as things get up and running we are looking for 
> contributors writing cool extensions!
> 
> Cheers
> Lukas
> 
> -- 
> Lukas Renggli
> http://renggli.freezope.org



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