Nice extension!
Can you protect select pages from being viewed by an anonymous user?
Also, I thing the introduction is missing some text.
Topic on Extension talk:UserProtect
It doesn't handle view right now. It might be added at some point though. Which text are you looking for?
It was the features section, but I see it has been added. Thanks!
Also, it would be great if it was possible to cascade protections to all subpages of a page or give special access to single user accounts. No hurry though.
I'm actually the developer behind Extension:Semantic ACL. This latter extension gets the job done, but yours appears to be a more durable solution that is more in line with the MediaWiki way of doing things and does not interfere with the cache.
Cascading subpage protection is an interesting idea. I'm not sure though because I like the way the extension currently mirrors the core page protection, which I don't think can do that. But we probably should add the ability to cascade-protect transcluded pages.
I'm not sure what you mean by "give special access to single user accounts". The extension already can add specific rights. Do you mean that you'd like to grant specific users the ability to use "User protect"? Well, you can do that by adding "userprotect" to the rights array like with most other rights. So add something like:
$wgUserProtectRestrictionTypes['userprotect'] = true;
You can use UserProtect to grant UserProtect :). That's a little trick that maybe should be documented.
I didn't make the connection between you and Extension:Semantic ACL. That is also a great extension and we took a long look at it before writing a new one. The main issue was that our client needed the ability to block (remove rights) for certain users on a per-page basis, among other needs.
Regarding the "read" right, one issue is that we would need to disable cache for that setting to take immediate effect. But the bigger problem is security. I'm confident that we can securely block every right except "read". Really there needs to be a major modification to core in order for extensions to block "read". But if enough people ask, maybe. :)
Great!
By "give special access to single user accounts", I meant for instance giving specific user accounts (rather than to user groups) rights to view or edit a page.
Otherwise , I understand your concern of not being able to provide full read protection. I've managed to do it through inclusions and search, but there are probably many other was someone can gain access to protected content...
So that's actually what the extension does. The regular MediaWiki Protect tab is for user groups and the UserProtect tab is for user accounts.