Extension:HidePageTabs

The MediaWiki HidePageTabs extension allows to:

- Force article tabs hiding, this works despite the user groups or permission. Actions such as edit, move and so on will still be available if manually pointed in the url, but the tab in the page will not be visible. A tipical example for using this functionality is the hiding of the tabs in the Main Page, where you dont want tabs such as edit, move or delete to be visible.

- Allow only one between edit and edit with form tabs to be visible: it will hide the edit with form for Templates and Forms. For all other pages, if the edit with form will be available it will hide the edit tab. This helps when you want to drive users using forms for the editing of an article

- Hide views and actions tabs according to user groups / category configuration: This works configuring for the a specific group the list of the categories where actions should be checked and the list of possible views or actions that needs to be hidden. The page will be always built according to the wiki wgGroupPermissions configuration, btu tabs will be eventually removed according to the configuration rules.

IMPORTANT: This extension does not defines or modify the user group permissions. Assuming an user's group provides permission editing an article, he/she will always be able to edit the source of the page simply appending the "&action=edit" to the article url.

Usage
For each article the following tabs can be hidden by this extension:

Force Hiding
This is always the first feature processed by the extension, it simply forces the hiding of tabs independently to any other settings (users groups or permission or category based hiding).

For each article that in your mind should never have one of the above listed tabs, you should define in your LocalSettings.php configuration file, after the inclusion of HidePageTabs, a directive specifying the group-> tab to hide, and add it to the $hideTabsPageList array.

The syntax for the directive definition follows the standard PHP array's one.

Example: If you want to always hide for "Main Page" article the "Read", "Edit", "View history" tabs and the "Delete" and "Move" action, you should add the following line after the inclusion of HidePageTabs extension:

$hideTabsPageList['Main Page'][views] = array('view','edit','history'); $hideTabsPageList['Main Page'][actions] = array('delete', 'move');

Allow only one between edit and edit with form tabs to be visible
This is always the second feature processed by the extension.

Mediawiki Standard behaviour is the following: If an user has edit permission on an article and the page is related to Category with its own Form for editing defined, both the standard "Edit" and "Edit wit form" are showed.

Creating and defining form, allows wiki administrators to facilitate the insert/editing of information, and assure all the needed semantic properties are eventually defined within the template. Allowing users to edit the source of a page might bring to inconsistent semantic data.

HidePageTabs helps avoiding this scenario, hiding the standard "Edit" tab and leaving only the "Edit with form" option available to the user.

In order to achieve this goal, you should configure the $allowGroupToCategory array in your LocalSettings.php configuration file, after the inclusion of HidePageTabs.

No further configuration is required for this functionality.

'NB: This functionality is currently under development and will be hopefully soon available..

Hide views and actions tabs according to user groups / category configuration
Example scenario:

You have a category called "tickets". Now you create a category called "incidents".

You want some of your user to be able to read the articles belonging to both categories but not able to view and link the edit tab (or other tabs). You want some of your user to be able to read the articles belonging to both categories and view the edit tab (or other tabs) only on category "tickets". You want some of your user to be able to read the articles belonging to both categories and view the edit tab (or other tabs) only on category "incidents". For this you create different groups, you set the proper permission and eventually consider using an ACL extension to achieve your goal. You also realize that it will require you effort maintaining this ACL and protecting/updating.

You know that Mediawiki and Semantic would allow you to quickly provide what they need, while assuring a smart, robust, maintainable and limitless solution for your purpose.

Having a wiki will allow your user to take familiarity with this tool, and in time being allow you to encourage a knowledge sharing culture.

Most of your user are not interested in the collaborative aspect of your wiki, and they don't have the capabilities/interest on understanding Mediawiki and Semantic "backend side" concepts. They just need to be able to trace and update some ticket.

Here it comes what HidePageTabs extension aims to provide: Simply hide user the link you don't want them to click (check the important note at the beginning of the article).

With the third functionality of this extension, you still need to create categories, groups and define their permission. Then associate to each group the list of Categories users are supposed to access, and for each of those category define the tabs that should be hidden.

The scenario previously described can be summarized as the following table:

'NB: This functionality is currently under development and will be hopefully soon available..