Hi Clemens, Installing an extension on a subwiki is a perfectly valid use case, especially when you have a farm where each subwiki is isolated and managed by a different entity (e.g. myxwiki.org). Installing extensions that require PR on subwikis is indeed an important issue/limitation. I agree that knowing what rights are required by an extension is important and it would be nice to display this somewhere on the Extension Manager UI. Something that we are currently working on is called "Signed Scripts" which, as the name suggests, will allow extension authors to sign their scripts. The Extension Manager will ask if you trust the extension author and import its public key if so. I don't know if this will fix the PR issue on subwikis. I'll let those that know more on this topic to reply. Hope this helps, Marius On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Clemens Klein-Robbenhaar <[email protected]> wrote:

A few days ago I ran into some problems when trying to install an extension via the extension manager. The problem was that the pages of this extension require programming rights and I have been doing the install as a local admin of a subwiki. As the local admins have no programming rights the extension got installed without error message, but then it failed to work properly (of course).

I first thought about reporting a bug that users without programming rights should have no access to the extension manager to avoid these problems, but then I figured out that this might be too restrictive. For example one does not need Programming rights to install a color theme; there is not reason why a local admin should not be able to do that.

The problem is that one cannot distinguish in advance between the two cases of an extension needing programming rights and one not needing it.

So I wonder if it would be feasible to extend the ExtensionClass with a flag "Requires Programming rights" or the like and then any extensions found via the ExtensionManager will tell the Admin UI, if they need Programming rights to be installed or not. The UI then could check with the rights of the current user and inform about the problem before installing.

Of course this creates a backward compatibility issue; one has to treat a missing value for that flag somehow. Maybe assuming that a missing flag means "no programming rights required" is ok, because that way extensions without this flag will be handled exactly the same as they are currently handled

However I wonder if I talk about a real problem here, or if this is not really needed, but it is me doing something wrong. (E.g. is it actually advisable to install an extension only on one local wiki, and not on the complete farm?)

Any thoughts?

Clemens _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users