Using TW in-house, securely, with multiple users

[wkowalski]

Hello:

I am looking for a good wiki solution for my workplace.  TW is appealing for many reasons, but I have some questions about sharing among multiple users.  Firstly, we work with extremely sensitive material and so Dropbox or any other cloud-based storage is entirely out of the question, as is password protection.  Does TW allow for some kind of hosting on an in-house server, and if so what would that look like?  Or would we really have to simply email the latest version to each other?

Secondly, when one updates or adds an entry and saves it, what exactly is being downloaded?  Is there any kind of data exchange with a central server somewhere?  I confess this part of it seems counter-intuitive to me, because it looks to me like some kind of overwrite is taking place. 

Thanks in advance.

[Danielo Rodríguez]

There are some Server-Side solutions

* Node JS edition. Very weak in terms of security and multi user usage

* There is another server side solution, based on python, but I allways forget it's name. It requires a specific plugin installed on tiddlywiki. I'm not sure about multi user usage.

* There are many plugins to connect to different backends. You can for example use the couch adaptor to connect your wiki to a couch database, and even host the wiki on the couch database.

[PMario]

On Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 4:10:20 PM UTC+2, wkowalski wrote:

As Danielo wrote,
There is much room for a better multi user experience.

Secondly, when one updates or adds an entry and saves it, what exactly is being downloaded?  

All changes are done in your browsers memory. Even if you change the content from tiddlywiki.com and download it. No tiddler data is sent to the hosting server.  tiddlywiki.com is a github page.

tiddlywiki.com contains google tracking code, to get some user statistics. ... If you download emtpy.html there is no code that will communicate with any "home server".

Is there any kind of data exchange with a central server somewhere?

No. Except you start TW with a nodejs server.
 

 I confess this part of it seems counter-intuitive to me, because it looks to me like some kind of overwrite is taking place. 

The TW core is able to manipulate its internal tiddler store. If you hit the download button it saves itself to your harddisk, without the need for a server. ... That's part of the TW magic :)

Hope that helps

have fun!
mario

[PMario]

On Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 4:10:20 PM UTC+2, wkowalski wrote:

Hello:

I am looking for a good wiki solution for my workplace.  TW is appealing for many reasons, but I have some questions about sharing among multiple users.  Firstly, we work with extremely sensitive material and so Dropbox or any other cloud-based storage is entirely out of the question, as is password protection.  Does TW allow for some kind of hosting on an in-house server, and if so what would that look like?  Or would we really have to simply email the latest version to each other?

The multi user possibilities imo depend on you workflow.

eg: 

 - If there is one editor and the "multi users" are just consumers, imo it would be easy to create an environment, that works for you.

 - If there are several editors, that need to be able to manipulate the same TW at the same time, it's not possible atm.


The security requirements imo depend on, if you consider a browser a secure environment for your information.

 - TiddlyWiki doesn't need a server, to manipulate its data.
   - It can save itself back to the harddisk.
   - Depending on your browser, the user experience varies. eg: TiddlyFox addOn for FireFox allows TW to directly overwrite itself. Other browsers create a new file with every save action ..

 - If you use eg: nginx or apache it would be possible to serve a file TW to different (read only) users.
   - This setup should be relatively simple, to get from your IT.

 - TiddlyWiki allows you to encrypt the tiddler store. So you can safely send it per mail. If you open the TW without knowing the encryption password, you just get a fully functional but empty TW.
 - Depending on your security policies (your auditor), this may or may not be an option.

 - As I wrote in the first post. The TW server is mainly for testing purpose, so lacks user management, authorisation and authentication.

There also is TiddlyDesktop application, which implements a browser like environment to manage file based TiddlyWikis. This may be an option too.

If you have more questions. Just ask.

have fun!
mario