jhh Wikis HelpForBeginners

What Is This?

This is a wiki--which is a kind of collaborative website. Wikis try to put as little as possible in the way of people sharing useful content in a manageable way. In a classical wiki, you can edit any page, add comments, and create new pages on the spot. This wiki requires login for full page editing, but allows guests to append comments to most pages. Intuitive text formatting rules are used to simplify the process of writing and linking pages. Users of this site who prefer a WYSIWYG approach can use the EpozEditor (a simple through-the-web HTML editor) to work with pages. The idea is to keep the text that people edit simple, so it's readable as is, and, most importantly, editable by anyone, without sacrificing attractive presentation.

For a short discussion of Wiki Webs, visit WikiWikiWeb. For an overwhelming example of what can be done with wiki, visit the Wikipedia, a multilingual collaborative online encyclopedia currently containing more than 200,000 articles. For more about the software and design of this wiki, see ThisServer, ZWiki and CommonPlace

Navigation

Each page has a unique name, which is used for the title, url and hyperlinks between pages; these are most often made by joining capitalized words together. See ZWiki:WikiName. Links like the last one (two wikinames separated by a colon) lead to another site. In full mode, pages are arranged in a hierarchy.

To see which pages link to this one, click the title of the page (HelpForBeginners)
To see both incoming links to this page and outgoing links from this page, click "Neighborhood" in the navigation bar at the top.
To search all pages, enter text in the search field and click the search button
To list pages by last edit time, visit RecentChanges from the navigation bar at the top
To see previous edits, click "View Page History" at the foot of each page
To see all pages in this wiki, in alphabetical order, click Index from the navigation bar at the top

Email Subscription

If you see a "Subscribe to" link to the right of a page's name, you can subscribe to that page or the whole wiki to receive comments by mail. If configured, subscribers may also send comments by mail.

To receive comments (not edits) by mail, click "subscribe"; if necessary, enter your email address and click "Change"; click the page or wiki subscribe button to toggle your subscription status (green means you are subscribed).
To send comments, just reply, or send mail to the wiki's mail address. Your comment will appear on the original comment's page, or on the page whose wiki name appears in your mail's subject, or on the site's default mail-in page. (Check with site owner for availability of this feature.)

Editing

You have full editing rights to any page, unless restricted by the site admin or page owner. SandBox is the place to play with WYSIWYG editing and StSandbox is available for practice with Structured Text. You could open either in another window to test the things you read here. WYSIWYG editing is described on the EpozEditor page. Structured Text editing, described below, is often quicker for simple pages and comments.

Add a comment using the form at the bottom of the page
Click "edit" to change the page's content (login may be required); the page will be formatted and linked according to the TextFormattingRules. You may also be able to upload a file or choose other options on the editing page.
Create new pages by adding a unique wiki name to an existing page and then clicking on the question mark beside it in view mode.
After you have configured a user name, in full mode you may also be able to reparent, rename and delete pages using the form at bottom.

Structured Text Formatting Rules in a Nutshell

It's possible for the site admin or a page editor to set different rules; these are the default currently used on most Zwiki sites. See TextFormattingRules for a complete reference to editing.

Wiki names, [freeform page names in brackets]?, http://URLs , structured text-style links and ZWiki:RemoteWikiLinks are made into hyperlinks (look at this sentence in editing mode).
Text beginning and ending with *, **, _ or ' is italic, bold, underlined or monospaced respectively
One or more non-blank lines are run together form a paragraph; blank lines separate paragraphs
A one-line "paragraph" followed by a more-indented paragraph makes a heading
A paragraph beginning with - or * or 0. and a space makes a bullet or numbered list item; a more-indented list item starts a sub-list
HTML tags may be used if necessary; on sites which permit it, DTML tags (server-side code) may also be used
Some or all of the above rules may be escaped, by putting ! at the beginning of a link or a line LikeThis; by enclosing text in single quotes LikeThis ; or by indenting text after a paragraph ending with a double colon :
```
      LikeThis  
      escapes <HTML tags> and &dtml-too;
```

What Is This?

Navigation

Email Subscription

Editing

Structured Text Formatting Rules in a Nutshell

Finding Out More