For the Love of My Country

Mediawiki is the PHP/MySQL engine that runs wikis such as Wikipedia. I am an admin on a wiki and needed to change user permissions such that registered users would have usual editing rights (talk, main, etc), but that anonymous users would only have permission to edit the talk (discussion) pages. This is so that - while everyone has the ability to contribute, only registered users may contribute to the articles themselves - we wished to set it up this way to avoid abuse of the wiki.

Anyway, was hacking round for ages in LocalSettings.php, trying to change $wgGroupPermissions. Finally figured out that I was attacking this from the wrong angle. The thing is, if you set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = true;, you automatically overide other restrictions placed on anonymous users (* means all users, including anonymous users). However if you set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;, all you end up doing is completely removing all rights held by anonymous users.

I found the answer to my problem at the Mediawiki Users Forum, and found it to be pretty darn straight forward after a little bit of playing round with it. Comment here or at the forum if you need further assistance.

Labels: mediawiki, php

Some kids managed to rotate the screen orientation on the little HP Mini laptop. Had seen it done before but had no idea what the key combination was. Try:

ctrl+shift+up

until you get the screen rotated to the way you want it. Apparently you can also change it through the control panel: Open Control Panel > Display > Settings tab > advanced, navigate through the tabs to find a rotate display option.

Labels: XP

Here's an excellent, highly-customizable, pretty simple and intuitive PHP script. It integrates reCaptcha very nicely, and has a whole host of additional fields such as password, attachment, and check-lists which can be included. highly recommended

Labels: php, webdev