CPWiki:Coding help

From CPWiki

Mediawiki is a great tool, both as a content management method and a collaborative writing environment. But for some, it's a little hard to understand, since a wiki is basically a programming/writeup language that has to be learned. Here are the basics for our Crystal Plainiers.

How to Edit

A wiki is a collection of articles (pages) connected with hyperlinks. Because of how quickly the size of something like this can grow, it can be overwhelming to some people, but the basics are actually quite simple.

On a wiki, everyone is both a reader and a potential editor. Even without having to register for an account, you can slip into the code of any article and change whatever you want. To keep people from vandalising the pages, those changes are logged and saved, and a page can be reverted to any earlier version at any time -- so don't be afraid to jump in, head first!

When viewing a page, you may have some information to add or see a spelling or grammar error that needs to be changed. At the top of the page you will see a button that says "edit" -- click this to enter the editing window. Don't be intimidated by the strange symbols; I'll explain those further down the page. Make your changes, along with a short summary that tells what you did, and click "Save Page". The article will now be updated with your changes.

To create a new page, or fill in a dead link (dead links show as red by default), just go to the page that hasn't been created yet -- you'll know because the page will say "hasn't been created yet" -- and click "edit". Now you can start the article with a clear box.

Basic Coding

When editing a page, the toolbar just above the text box gives you some basic functions to add to your text. Here's a run-down of some of the most common:

• ''text'' - Two apostrophes - NOT quotation marks - give you italicised text
• '''text''' - Three give you bold
• == text == - Two equal signs create a header from your text
• === text === - Adding more equals to each side makes smaller headers
• [[text]] - Two square brackets on each side of a word turn it into an interwiki link
• :text - A semicolon indents your text. Adding more increases the indent.

For more, see Advanced coding.

Don't be afraid to look at the source code for any article to see how a particular effect is made.