Topic: Does MediaWiki support sme users or protected content?

[jptechnical]

I am new to SME, and really haven't worked with media wiki, so this question might be outside the scope of this forum.

Does MediaWiki contrib have any integration with sme users?
Can I setup private or protected wikis?

Here is my desired scenario: Seperate departments, say sales and service, want a wiki for documentation. They would like to keep read access restricted to those in their departments. It needs to be fairly simple to add pages to their wiki and make sure they stay protected.

Thanks particularly to Dietmar, you have a ton of great contribs to your credit!

[mmccarn]

Mediawiki states over and over on their pages that they will not be held responsible for security problems with their software if you are trying to implement page access restrictions:
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_issues_with_authorization_extensions
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Page_specific_user_rights_extensions

Having said that, here is a mediawiki plugin that allows management of wiki security by namespace - that is http://your.wiki.com/dept1/* vs. http://your.wiki.com/dept2/*: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:HNP.  There are some other access restriction extensions - look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_Matrix

If you want to use your SME login information, you will need to implement a Mediawiki authentication extension like one of the following:
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:HttpAuth
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AuthIMAP
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAP_Authentication
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PwAuthPlugin

Be careful when playing with Mediawiki extensions - most of the current extensions seem to want Mediawiki 1.10.x or 1.11.x, both of which require PHP 5+ and so will not run on an un-modified SME 7.x server (since SME 7.x uses PHP 4.x).  The SME 7.x Mediawiki Contrib installs Mediawiki 1.6.10 - the last stable version that will run with PHP 4.x (Here's the 'upgrade' page for 1.7 stating that PHP 4.x is no longer supported: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_to_1.7).

I have ended up installing lots of other wikis in search of the functionality you're trying to get:
* integrated authentication
* reliable page access restrictions

plus, in my case:
* an "approved version" system such that authorized users can edit a page but other users still see the latest "approved version" of the page rather than the latest edit.