Author's Corner

Dear Authors...

...please take some minutes to read this text. It summarises the time I have spent today in creating the initial content of the NewWOM. It's purpose is to speed you up a little on how content can be created and edited on the Inn's Wiki pages

Administration notes

WoMTikiModifications

Trust and respect

The community of World of M.U.LE. authors is a community of trust and mutual respect. Everyone marked as an author has currently full rights for editing the content of this site. I expect from everyone of you to respect each other and don't mess around with each other's content (apart from correcting typos maybe ;-). The TikiWiki system I have installed here in theory allows to give specific author rights only to specific sections of the site, but in praxis it is a hell lot of work to assign those individual permissions. I hope it will never be necessary to move to that. :-)
So please: Only edit the sections you are assigned to

Who are "we"?

See SiteCredits page.

Wiki pages

You can think of a wiki page like an entry in an encyclopedia. Maybe you have already heard of Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia... This is based on the same technology as the Inn now is. Actually, as a beginning, you should read this article on wikipedia.org to get an overview of and get familiar with the wiki philosophy and concepts.

For adding or editing content, at best always start from the SiteContent? wiki page. From this page, every wiki page should be linked. Only user pages should allowed to be "orphaned" (i.e. not linked through any other wiki page).

So, how to make a new wiki page? Very simple! On any wiki page, somewhere in the editor box write a keyword composed of at least two words, without a space, each word starting with a capital letter. Such as this example: FiveWordsWithCapitalLetters?. When saving the page, you will notice a small question mark behind that word. Actually you will notice this quite a lot on the existing wiki pages. Just click on the question mark and you can edit the page! When saved, all the question marks at every occurence of FiveWordsWithCapitalLetters? on every wiki page will automatically link to the content you saved - this is an inherent principle of the wiki system.

Above the wiki editing window there is a nifty little toolbar called "Quicklinks". Just hover with the mouse over the items to find out what they're for. They're very handy for the creating of Wiki pages.
Also, there is a button at the bottom of the edit screen named "wiki help". Click this and you will find a list of possible tags in the wiki, and available TikiWiki plugins/modules.

Actually, I decided to create a ThisIsAllWhatTikiWikiCanDo page which just lazily does everything what TikiWiki can do and what you could use for designing your pages.

Well, that about summarises how to edit the World of M.U.L.E. wiki pages... Easy enough, isn't it?

You can use the FiveWordsWithCapitalLetters? page for testing purposes, or alternatively the inherent "Sandbox" feature of TikiWiki.

Note: Do not use the image upload or file upload feature of the wiki pages. Rather use the image and file galleries, then copy the link to the Wiki pages. Those two features are unfortunately not synchronised, and the galleries are more flexible to be reused.

For more indepth information on what TikiWiki can do and what features and so-called "modules" are available for your wiki pages, please visit the TikiWiki homepage.

Here is a direct link to the TikiWiki site.

Well... Happy editing now!

Note: Wiki page size

Due to database restrictions, a single Wiki page cannot be larger than 64KByte. So please don't be surprised if a large page, after saving, seems to be cut off in the middle... If you experience that, please split your article in a set of Wiki pages (have a look at SegaBase? for examples).

Some Wiki Tools to make life easier

HTML2Wiki

If you have a large HTML content you would like to migrate, there is a nifty tool which helps you convert HTML pages into the Tiki CMS Wiki dialect: HTML2Wiki Conversion tool. If your original page has only a few pictures, please upload those images using the Tiki Image Gallery feature and relink them. If your original HTML pages have lots and lots and lots of images, please contact me (Goethe) for uploading the images to a subdirectory directly on the webserver. Then you can use the tools "Base URL for relative links" feature

Articles

Articles should only be used for news items. When you submit an article, you can and should assign one or more categories to it.

Images

All images are stored in so-called "galleries". Have a look at the Wiki code of this page to see how they can be used. You are free to create new image galleries for your content sections anytime, but please try to be not too chaotic. ;-)

Note: When creating new galleries, please use a thumbnail size of 40x40 (default is 80x80). I'd like to keep impact on the mySQL database as small as possible, and those thumbnails are stored in the DB.

Downloads

Same as for images. There you can see how download links can be integrated in Wiki pages. Feel free to create new file galleries and upload new content.

Link Directory

All WoM users can submit links. All WoM authors have the right to validate submitted links. All links you submit are automatically valid and show up in the directory, visible to all users.

Final Words

After spending today on becoming familiar with the system I installed, I am more and more surprised of it how powerful it is. I hope you will think the same. :-)

Final final words

Please keep track of changes to the underlying Tiki files here: WOMTikiModifications.

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