Using the Editable Information "Wiki" System

This is a short user-guide to using the Association's "wiki" system for creating and editing on-line documents. The system uses simple codes to achieve things like making links and creating new pages.

Creating and organizing pages

Creating new pages:

The basic idea is that you create a page when you try to reach a page that doesn't exist yet. When you do this, you obtain a blank page in «edit» mode. Then you type the content and submit the new page ... you're done.

Step 1 : create a link to your future new page (edit the "Start Page" for example).

Pages are identified with their "page name". This can be any text, but you should try to keep page names as short as possible. You will set later a "page title" that can be more explicit.

Simply type : [[my page name]] , or [[my page name | hyperlink text]].

Step 2 : save the current page, and click on the link you've just added - now just type your content and save it.

Note : when a link to a new page is parsed, the system appends a «?» sign to make it easy understand the corresponding content doesn't exist yet and has to be created.

Organizing pages:

One of the most irritating tasks in systems like this is maintaining information about the page hierarchy (if applicable) , and repeating it on each page you write, so that readers don't get lost and quickly browse back to page parents.

The solution is an optional «parent» field in the page edit form. In view mode, the system displays a navigation bar linking to all parents, climbing the page hierarchy till no more parents can be found (parent field left empty). The system automatically sets the «parent» field of newly created pages to a reasonable guess, i.e. the page that hosted the hyperlink (if applicable) leading to the current page's creation.

Editing Content:

The system displays a wysiwyg editor whenever possible while editing pages. If your browser doesn't support the wysiwyg editor, a simple text editor is displayed.

There a some good basic rules to use when aditing text:

  • use tables to fully control page layout
  • don't use too many font styles or colors
  • use simple sentences

The table below details some special useful features of the system:

[pagebreak] This tag "cuts" your content in pages at display time ; a navigation bar to next and previous pages is automatically added.
<[PageIndex]> This tag is replaced by the alphabetical list of all pages in the system's document store.
<[RecentChanges]> This tag is replaced by the 20 last modified pages list.

Table below displays wiki codes that are interpreted by the system at display time, whenever they are found in a page content:

<text> Text is strong/bold.
{{text}} Text is italic.
---- Horizontal rule
[[BR]] Line break.
[[IMG url alt]] Image tag.
[[url]] , or [[url title]] Hyperlink
[[page name]] link to another page. (Hint: best way of making new pages)
[[page name | link title]] link to another page. (Hint: another way of making new pages)
xxx@domain.ext <<mailto>> hyperlink
>text blockquote
*text bullet list