HowToEditThisPage

Editing works similar in most Wikis and so here.

When working with this wiki, you should understand each wiki entry as a mirco structural item (a "News Unit", "Tiddler",...). Those items are composed together into pages.

Some entries are special: they are used implement "additional" features. Additional comes in quotes: the standard formatting is done by a template named "template" (surprise;-). That's already such a special entry.

Basic Handling

To get started, ignore special entries. We'll return to them later.

1. To start editing you should push the edit button. This places a lock at the entry, which makes the button disappear for everyone else.

   Note: If you accidentally skiped this step, don't worry. Editing and even saving works. But if someone else properly placed the lock while you where editing, you will loose your work and the other one wins.

2. Now edit the text.

   Don't change the title or links in the top and left zone nor anything near the bottom where the last change time is. Only the text within the thin black frame is for user modification [1]. The other areas are cut out when you save.

   When done use your WebBrowser's save (with Amaya, openoffice ...) or publish (with Mozilla/Netscape)-button to save your changes.

   Do so whenever you feel it worth. Nobody but you will see your changes until your completed step 4.

   If that failes chances are that you've got a timeout. This happens sometimes in a loosely connected network. Don't panik, try again.

3. If you need another page, name it with a word, which starts with an upper case character and contains at least a second one. Once saved, this will be turned into a link to a new page. (This is a common convention of most abbreviations, WikiWiki etc.).

   Most browsers require you to reload the page to make the link visible.

4. When you're satisfied with your work, push the release button.

Other Functions

Normal editing is only available, for those listed in the author field of the page (explained below). However anybody can add an "sms", a short message of at most 160 characters (longer messages are ruthless cut there).

The listed authors have a button to delete all the sms at once (take care).

If an entry is locked, other registered authors get a chance to break the lock. When a lock is broken, a message is sent to the entry point of the user who owns the broken lock.

TODO: add the discussion board here. One per entry.

Advanced Handling

TODO

You can store a style sheet in any page and use is to format the page by appending "?template=mystyle" to the request. There are already several templates of general utility: source, plain, text (supporting wiki-remote.el [TODO broken for emacs21]), context, htmldoc, Lout and the default template.

Tips

When writing at fresh pages save and reload after a small amount of edits to verify that you're not within the sections, which are cut out. You can also check whether you are at the page source level: alltop level elements, which have a class attribute value of decoration are removed.

The old Netscape is known to submit badly formed pages. This can hide the decoration from the cutting process. Better upgrade.

The From field lists authors, who are responsible for changing content. To add others, put them into a comma separated list (no spaces yet). This form is used when the release button is pushed.

The Protection field (only available to the owner of the scratch pad knowledge base) is used to change the AskemosProtection.

The page named "template" defines the standard layout template. There are more templates. To use another template to presend a page append "?template=source" (with source replaced with the actual template name and no quotes) to the URL of the page. One such template, ASIS is special: no processing is done at all.

The page named metasystems contains a list of scratch pad data bases, which are stacked below the current one. All entries (including templates), which are not defined in the current pad are inherited. But backlinks are found only within one such vocabular module.

Tagging: to categorise your work, you might want attach tags to your entries. A tag is an entry of it's own. Just reference it to attach. You can view all entries, which carry a tag from that tag's entry via "back links" feature. Future versions should attach some attribute to distinguish between tags and back links from "normal" entries.

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1. To be technically precise, children of the element with the id attribute value decorationframe are preserved. Failing that, elements with an class attribute of decoration are removed, children of elements with a class attribute of decorationframe are exemined recursively, all other elements are retained.