24 March 2009
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Upgraded site security from version 3 to 4
The site was running SimpleSecurity 3.4.8 which was an older version that hasn't been updated since July 2007. We hadn't been able to upgrade to the most recent version because it requires at least MediaWiki version 1.12, but since we've recently upgraded the site to MediaWiki 1.14 the upgrade to the latest version of SimpleSecurity was finally possible. So today the upgrade was made and we're now running the latest version (SimpleSecurity 4.3.0 from the MediaWiki subversion repository).
One of the issues with the upgrade from SimpleSecurity 3.x to 4.x is that the older version uses the #security parser function to apply permissions settings to articles, whereas the newer 4.x versions extend the native MediaWiki protection page. So to ensure that all the articles which had been protected with the old parser function would still remain protected, a dummy extension was created which defines the #security parser function and makes act as a category link. The result of this is that all articles containing the old #security parser function are automatically categorised into Category:Private which has been made readable only by administrators using SimpleSecurity4.
