Password protect only selected content on public confluence wiki

[Sebastian]

I'm currently testing confluence with jira (both onDemand) for our relatively small academic institution. We do have the need to put websites up for lectures. Those websites usually contain some content that needs to be password protected, i.e. it is only available to students who actually take the course. How can I achieve this in confluence? In your answers, please consider that I'm not a web developer. I'm just checking out confluence (I so far have not even started on jira). I really like the it so far, but I need to find a simple fix for this somehow.

[Pepe]

See our little add-on. I wrote it for sharing passwords, etc internally. A new version will be on marketplace shortly (MSSQL doesn't work in the current version). Note this is not available for OnDemand so you'd have to run confluence standalone: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.prcpo.confluence.plugins.secure-content-block

JIRA allows you to use Issue Security schemes to hide certain issues within a project. You would have a public security level, and active student level. You can protect sensivite issues by setting the security level to 'active student.'

Within Confluence you can restrict the view permissions on a page to a group that contains your active students. If you need to mix public and hidden information on a single page you can use the Include macro to include your view restricted page into another publically viewable page. Active students would see all of the content, whereas, public users would only see the public content and not the restricted content.

[Andreas]

That add-on looks great, do you think you will be able to provide it for OnDemand as well?

[Pepe]

Thanks Jan. Unfortunately I don't think it will make it to OnDemand because it requires access to the confluence database (which wasn't allowed last I knew). We could make it a remote plugin for OnDemand but your encrypted data would have to live on our servers and I'm not sure that we want to take on that responsibility, nor that customers would be comfortable with it. Stay tuned-if we can figure out a way to make it work we will.

[Sebastian]

One fix that I could think of is to create a user "student" and give the user a password and restrict this user only to be able to view certain pages and download specific content. Then what happens if two students try to sign in and download at the same time?