WiTTIE Wiki Operational

We've had the WiTTIE project server running and the wiki installed on it for a few days, but it wasn't until today that we got it locked down to prevent unauthorized account creation or content access. Because we're dealing with classrooms of children, and could potentially be hosting some personally-identifiable information about them, we don't want all sorts of random people editing or even viewing content. Now, I know that it's sort of contrary to the whole wiki philosophy to prevent access (especially read access!) but I can justify these settings for this particular wiki. First, we do need a controlled environment to do any kind of real scientific study. Second, I hope that benefits derived from this project will be folded back into public wikis like Wikibooks and Wikiversity.

This morning I set it up so only admins could create new accounts, and only registered users can view or edit pages. Well, anybody can see the main page, but everything else should be locked down against viewing. So, now it is. And with that, I'm comfortable posting a public link to the project website (Even though there isn't anything much for most people to see there).

Collections Extension and the FCKEditor are installed now. I also got some basics set up, like ParserFunctions, which I almost can't do without. Especially when we're talking about books and navigation, we need ParserFunctions. I kicked around the idea of installing StringFunctions and maybe DynamicPageList too, but we don't need them (yet) so I wont clutter the server with things we don't need, even though I'm so used to wanting it at Wikibooks. My next goal is to try to get FTP set up so the rest of the team members can upload content for the website without having to go through the "Whiteknight bottleneck" (that's me). I also added jQuery to the default skin so we can start using it to build some neat JavaScript tools.

It's not bad progress for the first weekend of the project, and I am hopefull that we can keep this kind of good energy and momentum going for the next few weeks. I also think we might be getting a fourth member added to our team too, but I'm not sure about the details of that. It's always good to have more hands on the project!