Question

What is the best way to disable edits on a TWiki (for example, in the period running up to a maintenance shutdown)? I guess you could brute-force it by hiding/renaming the edit and attach scripts but I'd like to give my users a more elegant failure.

Options I came up with in a 5 minute think included (in rough order of effort):

• Rename the edit and attach scripts to hide them
• Use an Apache Redirect directive to send the user to a static HTML error page.
• Create a new oops template and write new scripts to launch these pages on attempted access to the two scripts

What do other sites do in this situation?

Thanks Gareth

Environment

-- GarethEdwards - 18 Nov 2004

Answer

I've never been in the situation, but I think your option #2 is the simplest. Just set up a normal TWikiPage that states that you're doing maintenance, and use .htaccess to catch clicks on any edit link/URL.

-- TorbenGB - 19 Nov 2004

We use a much simpler way to do this:

1. > In TwikiPreferences
   1. > Use the BROADCASTMESSAGE variable to set an announcement of the impending "change freeze"
   2. > Set ALLOWWEBCHANGE to the TWikiAdminGroup. Make sure that you are included in this group.
   3. > Update FINALPREFERENCES to include ALLOWWEBCHANGE which means that only the accounts listed in AdminGroup may make any changes to any web.

If you suspect that someone has specifically allowed editing via ALLOWTOPICCHANGE then you can override this as well.

We've found this method much simpler as everything remains within TWiki.

-- SteveRJones - 22 Nov 2004

BTW, SamHasler answered a similar question in HowToDenyAccessToAllUsersAndAllGroupInaWeb

-- SteveRJones - 22 Nov 2004