Question

Hi,

Is there a way to create a personal private wiki for each registered user. I am trying to evaluate between Confluence and Twiki, and the only good thing that I have liked about Confluence is that each user gets a personal private space (i.e. Web) automatically. Is there a similar feature in Twiki, or can it be easily created using webs, topics, and access controls?

Suppose I have a single Web as "Personal" and for each user, inside that web, I create a topic "UserPersonalWiki" and set it by default that it is private only to that user. Would such a thing work? And what if a user wants to create other private topics, then what? Or should I create new private webs for each user, but wouldn't that be too much work?

What is the best method to achieve such a thing in Twiki?

Regards!

Environment

-- VikramParmar - 13 Oct 2006

Answer

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I'm planning on implementing such a set up in TWiki for our group.

The plan is to have a group web, for a common knowledge base and shared resources. Everyone in the group will have access.

Then, each group member will also have a private subweb, which inherits all of the preferences from the group web but is set to allow only the owner access. One of the nice parts of TWiki is that subweb owners can open up selected topics in their private space to other users, through access control settings.

I haven't done so yet, but I plan to have the subweb created when the user first registers.

Hope this helps.

-- ScottHoge - 14 Oct 2006

Wouldn't a new Web for each user be overkill? The documentation says that we should try to avoid creating too many webs as that may hamper performance! I was pondering whether what we need could be done using topics and categories?

-- VikramParmar - 14 Oct 2006

Performance is not the issue. There are companies that have many hundred webs.

You could establish a view restricted private web for each user, but I think this is not very wiki like, e.g. this promotes content hoarding instead of content sharing. I believe it is better to share the whole TWiki space, or where needed establish view access restricted areas for larger groups (for example Engineering content that needs to be shielded from the sales folks).

On the other hand it can be useful to create personal user pages that are shared, such as VikramParmarResume, VikramParmarPhotos or the like. You could provide inviting links to create those pages. You can create them automagically based on template topics if you use the TopicCreatePlugin

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Oct 2006

Thanks Peter & Scott!

-- VikramParmar - 16 Oct 2006