More Mediawiki Mayhem

Today was another Mediawiki day. I’ve been working on giving wiki owners permissions to update the sidebar, and add users to their wikis. It isn’t really a problem to give owners this kind of permissions. Basically I added the following lines:

$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['block']           = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['createaccount']   = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['delete']          = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['editinterface']   = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['move']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['protect']         = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['rollback']        = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['upload']          = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['owner']['userrights'] = true;

to my LocalSettings.php file and it creates an “owner” group that has permission to do these things. My struggle has been with creating accounts. There really isn’t an ideal way to create accounts for new users if you don’t allow users to create accounts for themselves. Sysops (and anyone else you assign createaccount permissions to) can create accounts by going into the Special Pages and using the “Log in / create account” link (there is a Create Account link under this). The problem is if you use this form and click the “Create Account” button it creates the desired account but logs you out of your normal account and logs you in with the newly created account. In contrast, if you use the “By Email” button, an email with the username and a random password for that account gets sent to the newly created account’s email. The two problems with this are: the email includes the administrator’s IP address in it and you can’t just get single button to appear that says “Create Account” but does so by email. What I really would like is a intuitive way to do this without having to hack Mediawiki. By hack I mean alter the base code. I don’t mind writing an extension or a Special Page to do this but I can’t figure out how to do this.

I plan on spending one more day working on this and then I’m going to move on (ie. hack it or accept the usability issues). I just don’t have time to be super finicky about this. All the same, it is a royally frustrating problem. I’m not particularly surprised that Mediawiki doesn’t have this kind of functionality because it doesn’t seem to have been originally designed to scale for the types of things I’m doing with it. However, it is so close to having all the functionality right there that it makes be terribly annoyed that the user creation and management features are so lame.