Website HOWTO

This page contains some notes on how to update the website.

Login

You will be prompted to login whenever you attempt to edit any page. You can login with any OpenID, but your ID needs to be granted admin rights before you will be able to make any changes.

The easiest way to get an OpenID login is to go and create one at http://myopenid.com.

Contact Paddy to get added to the list of admin users.

Editing pages

For the most part, to edit a page you simply navigate to that page, and then go to the edit page using the “Edit” link at the very bottom of the page.

The text on the page is processed as markdown. Most formatting is very simple to add using Markdown syntax.

Links to pages on other websites are added using the usual Markdown syntax, ie

[link text](link address)

Links to pages on this site are added using wikilinks.

Images

Images are most easily added using a special template which ensures that the images is consistently formatted for the site, and allows the image to be published to the front page of the site.

Use the following syntax: [[!template id="image" style="inline" size="medium" publish="true" image-file="filename.jpg"]]

This will add a locally attached image, inline with the text, to the page. The size will be 30% of the width of the page.

If style is changed to “banner”, the image will be placed full width at the top of the page. In this case the size parameter is ignored.

For inline images, the size parameter may be changed to “small” (to make the image 20% of the width of the page) or “large” (50%).

The publish parameter causes the image to be published to the “See also” section of the front page. Simply omit this parameter, or change to “false”, to prevent this.

The image-file parameter is used to reference an image file that is an attachment of the current page. If instead the image is elsewhere on the site, or is on an external site, the image-url parameter may be used instead, and the value of this parameter should be the full URL of the image.

Attachments

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Tags

Any page can be tagged with one or more tags by adding the following on any line:

[[!tag tag1 tag2 tag3]]

Announcements

Any item can be placed on the front page of the site in the announcements section simply by tagging it with the “announce” tag. Up to 4 pages tagged in this way will be published on the front page, sorted by age. Once displaced by newer items, they will disappear. They will still be findable through the archives of whichever section they were originally entered.

Therefore, all you need to do is add the item (eg to the news section) in the usual way, and then add the following text anywhere on the page:

[[!tag announce]]

It is also possible to tag an item to be announced indefinitely. This is achieved with the “announce-indefinite” tag. Note that to remove these items it is necessary to edit the item and remove the tag.

News items

Any item can be placed on the front page of the site in the Recent items section simply by tagging it with the “publish” tag. Up to 8 pages tagged in this way will be published on the front page, sorted by age. Once displaced by newer items, they will disappear. They will still be findable through the archives of whichever section they were originally entered.

Therefore, all you need to do is add the item (eg to the news section) in the usual way, and then add the following text anywhere on the page:

[[!tag publish]]

Adding new posts

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Other information

This site is based on ikiwiki which is a wiki compiler. If you have specific technical questions about how to achieve a specific thing, you are likely to find it by using the search feature on the ikiwiki site.

Site administration

Site administration is by Paddy. Please contact him with any site administration requests.