Features / Usability

Posted by Phil MacGovern 03 Feb 2005 15:20 GMT-0000 posts: 32

Good questions...

1. I use version 1.9
2. I didn't mention it, but I have also modified the search results page. The first thing I did was remove the 'page summary' (the first X characters of the page), as it was of little use, and replaced it with the description (I also modified the output so that the results are displayed in columns for each type of result, which is pretty cool (I'll attach a screen grab) - users were complaining that the search results was pretty hard to read). Since the page now just displays the title and description, clicking on the search result is exactly the same as if they had gone straight to the page, so the 'release' mechanism I mentioned before controls the page display. As far as the 'most recently modified pages' module, I don't use it .

I did a whole security modification for my site. We are using the site to support our internal processes (development, sales, and marketing) and to support customers (user documentation and support issues) - so we needed a way to cleanly control the access to a page. I decided to use categories and groups. Each object (be it a wiki page, file gallery, forum post, etc.) belongs to one or more categories; each user belongs to one or more groups. There are two levels of categories; the 'and' level (top) and the 'or' level (second level). I did this mainly to support customers; there is one 'Customer' category, and then each customer has a category below that, Customer-AcmeCorp, Customer-BigIndustries, etc. In order to access an object, a user must belong to a group with the same exact name as all the object's 'and' categories and then at least one of the 'or' categories (if the object has any, that is!).

I know that is not relevant in the least, but I am pretty proud of it.

Every time a user searches the site, everything is searched, but the results are filtered so they only see results in pages they can access.

I still have some more to go - namely the categorization of structures. My idea is that the categorization of the structure will override the individual page, but I still have to think on that. I also plan to implement namespaces, but that is a whole other topic