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;
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Finding Out More
More about Commonplace: CommonPlace:HomePage
More about Zwiki: ZWiki:FrontPage, ZWiki:ZwikiDocs, ZWiki:ZwikiFAQ
More about wiki: WikiWikiWeb:FrontPage, WikiWikiWeb:EvolutionOfaWikizen