Feature Proposals » Point and Click Access Control

Motivation

I have found the PreferencesPlugin very suitable to enhance the usability of TWiki, which is the primary focus of the IstanbulRelease (TWiki-5.1, to be released soon). It is now part of most WebPreferences as well as TWikiGroups topics.

To further increase the usability it would be nice to have a point and click user interface for access control in:

• TWiki groups settings: GROUP, ALLOWTOPICCHANGE
• WebPreferences settings: DENYWEBVIEW, ALLOWWEBVIEW, DENYWEBCHANGE, ALLOWWEBCHANGE, DENYWEBRENAME, ALLOWWEBRENAME, ALLOWTOPICCHANGE, ALLOWTOPICRENAME
• Topic access control settings: ALLOWTOPICVIEW, ALLOWTOPICCHANGE, ALLOWTOPICRENAME, DENY...

For now with the PreferencesPlugin, access control settings are simple text input fields, e.g. users need to remember or look up the exact name of users and groups they want to put into the access control settings.

To get point and click access control, we need to have a user/group widget with select boxes. One side listing groups and users that can be selected, the other side listing the group members, and buttons to move users and groups both ways. Something similar to WebPermissionsPlugin but with a nicer layout. (Although the WebPermissionsPlugin is a good start, IMHO it lacks on usability.)

The PreferencesPlugin supports editing all settings on a page at the same time. The user/group widget is big, so it would be useful to have an option to get an edit button per setting.

Description and Documentation

Add a onebyone="1" parameter to the %EDITPREFERENCES{}% that allos users to edit settings one-by-one. This can be done with jQuery based ModalBoxAddOn. Simulated example:

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 2011-06-10

This feature would be really nice to have in upcoming TWiki-5.1 release. It would increase the usability of TWiki. Anyone interested in helping implement that?

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-06-10

Ping. TWiki-5.1 is now released. Anybody taking this implementation into JerusalemRelease?

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-08-23

This is now accepted by the 7 days feedback rule.

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-10-16