Writing pages for this DWiki

DWiki directories and pages are just ordinary directories and files located under a special directory, the DWiki 'page directory'. To create or edit a DWiki page, you just use the editors and other tools you would ordinarily use to work with normal text files; your favorite editor, your favorite spellchecker, etc. (Normally you do this on the web host machine, which is probably running Unix.)

For this DWiki, the page directory is /u/cks/web2/pages.

Note: Unlike traditional wikis, you cannot edit or create DWiki pages through your web browser. (You can write comments if everything is set up to allow it, although you may need to authenticate yourself first.)

Writing ordinary pages

Instead of being written in HTML or anything complicated, DWiki pages are written in a form of plain text called DWikiText. You can read about it at that link, or use the 'View Source' link at the bottom of most pages to see what their wiki-text version looks like.

To write an ordinary DWiki page, just work on a file under /u/cks/web2/pages; the page's name relative to the root of this DWiki is its Unix path relative to that directory.

DWiki rejects certain page names that it considers bad or invalid; you can see the full discussion in InvalidPageNames. Although you can create a file with an invalid name through Unix, DWiki will never serve that file as a page.

Categorizing pages

The simple way to put a page into a 'category' is to make a category structure of directories and then put the page into the appropriate spot.

The other way is to explicitly mark the page in its wiki-text, by adding a note about it to the bottom of the page. The note conventionally looks like:

----
This is a Category/Help page.

Then you create an actual Category/Help page that uses the ListRefs macro to list all pages that contain a reference to the full category name, in this case {{ListRefs:Category/Help}}, with suitable explanatory text. (You can see this in the wikitext source for PageManagement, for example.)

Character sets

DWiki doesn't change what you write in wikitext; if you put accents or other non-ASCII characters in, DWiki will send them out to visitors exactly as they are. It's your job to make sure that you write files in the same character set that the DWiki is configured to tell clients that the pages are in.

This DWiki's character set is set to be: UTF-8.

Directories

See Directories for a discussion of what happens with directories in DWiki, because this is complicated enough to call for its own page.

Magic redirection files

Sometimes you may have page names that should really redirect readers to other pages, not be pages themselves. For example, moving a page, or pointing the plural of a name at the singlar version of the name (or vice versa).

DWiki supports this with redirection files, which are described more at that link.

Special page-name aliases

By convention, the DWiki page directory /Aliases (which means that for this DWiki it is the Unix directory /u/cks/web2/pages/Aliases) is used for convenient CamelCase aliases for DWiki pages. Such aliases can be used anywhere in the entire DWiki, without having to make them an explicit link and specify the path and so on.

To actually work as aliases, these should be redirection files. Then not only will they redirect any visitors, but when users see DWiki pages that use those aliases they'll see a direct link to the target page.


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Last modified: Wed Jun 8 03:29:16 2005
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