Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Blogs are good for one-shot expression of ideas an opinions but fall short for long articles which may be completed over a period of time and content may need to be updated after publication. So the need for a different kind of publishing mechanism. I wasn't interested in a full-fledged content management system, so created an experimental Ant and CVS based crude content management system for self-published articles. This worked to some extent but involves too much work, especially for minor edits.

So, this weekend I installed MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia, to experiment with Wiki based publication. The first entry, still incomplete, is on Prototype JavaScript Library.

Installation was a breeze, though setting access restrictions to prevent anonymous edits turned out to be non-trivial. Also, I am yet to figure out how to disable read access to certain pages for anonymous or even normal users. At first look, it appears that this may not even be possible, which is understandable given the origin of MediaWiki and its guiding principles.