Allow non-admin users to pin child pages

Hi everyone,

We recently introduced the ability to pin (reorder) child pages, but you need to have:

• wiki administration rights to be able to pin (reorder) top level pages
• page administration rights to be able to pin (reorder) child pages

Some users have complained that requiring administration rights to pin child pages is very limiting. See Loading... . I tried to argue that the child order is not a property of the parent (so it’s not enough to have edit right on the parent) but it seems many users expect this:

if you can add something in the children of a page, why can’t you choose where to add it (order it)

The current limitation comes from the fact that the list of pinned child pages is stored in:

• wiki preferences (XWiki.XWikiPreferences page) for top level pages
• page preferences (WebPreferences page) for nested pages

and both require administration rights to edit. Changing the storage is not easy as we’ll have to handle the migration. Instead, I’m thinking that we could implement this:

• add a page-level configuration option to control whether edit right on the parent page is enough to allow pinning child pages, true by default
• implement a REST resource to update the list of pinned child pages, that checks access rights based on the configuration option mentioned before (i.e. edit or admin)
• add a UI extension point to the Children viewer (?viewer=children), allowing extensions to inject additional “tabs” besides the default one that lists the child pages using a live data (it would look similar to the Page Index); the tabbed UI could be hidden if there is only one tab (the default live data view)
• the Index Tree Application can then provide:
  • either a generic “Tree” tab that shows the subtree rooted in the parent page, and has a button to switch the tree into drag & drop mode where the user can pin child pages (basically replicate half of the Navigation Panel administration section); the button would only be shown when the configuration option allows pinning with only edit right
  • or a dedicated “Pinned” tab that replicates the Pinned Child Pages administration section (the suggest input and the Save button); this tab would be available only if the configuration allows pinning with only edit right
• eitherway, the tab added by the Index Tree Application would use the REST resource to update the list of pinned child pages.

Obviously this would fix the limitation only for nested pages. For top level pages we would still ask for wiki administration rights.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Marius

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