XWiki allows you to control all access permissions at a fine grained level. There are different levels of control and these rights are cumulative. The rights for a page override the rights for a space, which override the rights for a wiki.

Thanks to the three levels of control offered by XWiki, it becomes quite easy to manage places where people are allowed to read, write and comment - or not allowed to.

For instance, say you have managers and staff in the marketing and IT department: you can create a group for the staff on each department and another for managers (4 in all), and a space for every category. Then you can choose to let marketing staff access the marketing space only, but let marketing managers have access to the IT space at the staff level (but not IT manager level), and so on...

Rights at the wiki level

Click on the "Wiki" menu and then on "Administer Wiki". Click on the "Rights" link located under "Users & Groups" as shown in the following images:

Here's how you can change permissions:

• Select the Users or Groups for which you want to set a permission.
• Click once in a checkbox to allow a right, twice to deny it and three times to clear the right (delete the entry). As a result, rights entries are saved automatically, using the Ajax technology.

There are some default users and groups you need to know about:

• Unregistered Users: represents the anonymous user (i.e., a user not logged in)
• XWikiAllGroup: represents all groups
• XWikiAdminGroup: represents all users with admin privileges

Rights at the space level

In order to edit rights at the space level you need to click on the "Space" menu (located on the top bar), click "Administer Space" and then click on the "Rights" link. You will see the following screen:

Then use exactly the same steps as the ones used for changing global rights.

Rights at the page level

Simply navigate to the page for which you wish to change the permissions. Click on the arrow in the "Edit" menu and then on "Access Rights":

Activating CAPTCHAs for anonymous comments

Go to the "Rights" administration page and tick the Require unregistered users to solve a captcha when posting a comment on a page check box as show on the following image:

Note that you also need to give the Comment right to unregistered users. After you've done so unregistered users will see the following when entering a comment on a page: