Background and Problem Statement

As the administrator of a server with about a hundred namespaces, I find that I get new requests for namespaces on a fairly regular basis. These requests typically come in email and they can get a little lost in the flood of email. Additionally, the process of responding to these requests take a little while and has some manual steps that would be no problem for a site with only a few namespaces, but if you're handling many it's useful to have some tools to streamline this process.

Solution

When a user of a FlexWiki federation wants a new namespace, they can now use a form to request the namespace. This form asks for some basic information (name of the namespace, title, description and contact email). Once the form is filled in and submitted two pieces of email are generated, one to the requester as a history of their request and one to an administrator email address requesting the creation of the namespace.

The email to the administrator contains information about the request and also contains a special link that the administrator can follow that will bring up the namespace creation form in the FlexWiki admin UI with all the fields pre-populated with values from the original request. At this point the administrator can optionally correct some of the values (e.g., to match local conventions for NamespaceFormat). Then the administartor can click OK and the namespace will be created and email will be sent to the original requestor saying that their namespace has been created.

Voila!

Getting Started

By default, the FlexWiki installation is set up to not accept requests for new namespaces through the request form. You must set one or two parameters in your web.config file to enable this feature.

To enable namespaces requests, you must set the SendNamespaceCreationRequestsTo app setting parameter in the web.config file. For example:

 <configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="SendNamespaceCreationRequestsTo" value="admin@yoursite.com" />

The value of this key should be set to the email address of somebody who should receive the requests for new namespaces.

There is one other application setting that you can configure. The DefaultImportedNamespaces setting is a comma-separated list of namespaces that will be imported into each namespaces created through the admin UI. If you have one or more namespaces that you always want imported into a newly-created namespace, this is the setting for you. If not, you can leave the setting out: it's optional.

 <configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="DefaultImportedNamespaces" value="Projects.Dogs, Projects.Cats" />

In addition to setting these parameters, you must also configure your FlexWiki site to be able to send mail. Typically this is done to enable the delivery of WikiNewsletters, but it is also needed to enable the NamespaceRequestTools. Specifically, you must ConfigureFlexWikiToSendMail; this process involves picking an SMTP server to deliver email and setting some additional parameters in the web.config file.

Finally, to request a namespace, have users navigate to /RequestNamespace.aspx on your site. (Note that this feature is turned off on www.flexwiki.com.)