I am trying to create a wiki for which viewing and editing the wiki must be restricted to two small groups of users.
Since it is a university society, we already have an external authentication system, run by the university, and I have already implemented that such that $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'] is used for authentication. This, however, allows access to anyone in the university. I want to create two small subsets of users 'exec' and 'steering_committee' who are able to view and edit the wiki.
I have been playing with the authentication plugin I have been using, but when I try and return false from authenticate($user, $pwd) I don't see any access forbidden warnings.
So my question is, what is the best way to go about creating this sort of authentication? I would like to be able to add data that is fetched about users (exec position, former exec positions) which are contained in two tables wiki_exec and wiki_user_former_positions so that it is available to the wiki.
The best way looks like using the MultiAuth plugin, although it is really not particularly easy to extend (although perhaps one has to be more familiar with MedaiWiki).
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MultiAuthPlugin
(thanks @Christian for pointing me in the right direction)