xWiki Deployment Default to Public View a good idea?

[YapWC]

Hi guys, recently I had transitioned from WikiJS to xWiki and it was really a comprehensive but also extensible Wiki in the same time. Kudos to all the developers creating a great software!

Long story short I realize that when I self host xWiki, the pages was publicly viewable. Should not it be better if it is defaulted to private view by default and only configure for public view when it is needed?

As someone new to Wiki Hosting most beginner users and company would assume that xWiki when deployed will be of private view just like most software out there. Some orgranization might overlooked this and have their important/sensitive content leaked without realizing it is viewable by anyone outside of the organization.

Should there be a cautionary note on github or installation guide to inform user or perhaps the deployment should be set to private by default?

[gabrielc]

In the context of a private company wiki, I agree that it would be expected for the wiki to be private by default. But XWiki could, and is used by a lot of other types of organizations for a lot of different things.

Some use XWiki as a public facing website, or public facing documentation.

Still, I think that somewhere in the deployment or initial onboarding process there should be an easy option to toggle this behavior.

Thank you for the feedback and welcome to the community!

[vmassol]

@YapWC

Hi guys, recently I had transitioned from WikiJS to xWiki

Awesome! We’re lacking knowledge of WikiJS in this community and I’d love to have your input on what WikiJS does better than XWiki in your opinion, and what XWiki does better than WikiJS

@YapWC

and it was really a comprehensive but also extensible Wiki in the same time. Kudos to all the developers creating a great software!

Are you referring to WikiJS or XWiki here?

@gabrielc

Still, I think that somewhere in the deployment or initial onboarding process there should be an easy option to toggle this behavior.

Yes that would make sense, especially since this is what we do when creating a new wiki inside of XWiki. See step 2 of “creating a new wiki” at https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Wiki%20Application#HCreateanewwiki :

cc @tkrieck since he’s working on Onboarding design improvements

[tmortagne]

@vmassol

Yes that would make sense, especially since this is what we do when creating a new wiki inside of XWiki. See step 2 of “creating a new wiki” at https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Wiki%20Application#HCreateanewwiki :

“Membership Type“, if that’s what you are referring to, does not really have any impact on guest right actually, a new wiki is always public (or to be more accurate, a new wiki inherit main wiki access configuration, so if the main wiki is private, it’s private). What this configuration is about is which main wiki user can be a member of the wiki (i.e. added to a group of that wiki).

[vmassol]

@tmortagne

“Membership Type“, if that’s what you are referring to, does not really have any impact on guest right actually, a new wiki is always public (or to be more accurate, a new wiki inherit main wiki access configuration, so if the main wiki is private, it’s private). What this configuration is about is which main wiki user can be a member of the wiki (i.e. added to a group of that wiki).

Right. Thx for the clarification. We should still discuss about adding a way to configure the main wiki or subwiki’s visibility at creation, as in https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Access%20Rights/#HWikiAccessConfiguration

@MichaelHamann also mentioned that DokuWiki has this in the initial setup wizard:

There are also options below that if user self-registration should be enabled, the content license and about usage statistics (similar to active installs). I think it could be interesting to have something similar in XWiki.

[tmortagne]

@vmassol

We should still discuss about adding a way to configure the main wiki or subwiki’s visibility at creation

Definitely, yes. And also in the DW for the first install for the main wiki probably as it does indeed make a lot of sense to ask that depending on those 2 commons use cases.