Help Guide to super Swiki

Welcome to this Swiki! A Swiki is a collaborative website; anyone can edit and create pages. While that may seem dangerous, it's also amazingly powerful. It turns out that we all know quite a bit about writing and talking together. We tend not to mess up one another's space, we tend not to talk trash, and we tend to try to contribute.

Swiki is implemented in Squeak, a Smalltalk with a liberal license. It was inspired by Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb. The Wiki was ported to Squeak (Squeak + Wiki = Swiki) by Mark Guzdial's Collaborative Software Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Navigating the Swiki

If you are familiar with regular web browsing, it should be fairly easy to navigate through the Swiki. The only major difference are the special features:

	View: Pressing the 'View' button takes you back to simply viewing the current page.
	Edit: This enables the user to edit the current page. Pressing on this button brings up a form where the text and title of the page can be changed. The changes made take effect when the 'save' button is pressed. In the rare case of an editing conflict, the user is given a chance to resolve it before saving. Plus, entering your e-mail address in the appropriate space will send you a message whenever the page is edited. Please, check below ('Editing Rules') to learn more about what kind of text is allowed.
	Lock or Unlock: Using this feature allows you to lock a page. That way, nobody can change the content of the page until it is unlocked. To add a lock, press on the lock button; then, enter the password you want to assign (twice to rule out typos). Then, only someone with your password or the administrator password can lock or unlock that page.
	References: This feature lists all the pages that link to the current page.
	History: This shows the different versions of the page through time. Since pages are editable, it sometimes is useful to look at what was previously on the page or to correct a mistake.
	Top: Pressing the 'Top' button takes you to the top of the Swiki (the first page).
	Recent Changes: This feature lists the pages by the last time they were edited in reverse order. This is very useful for finding what's new on the site.
	Attachments: With this feature, the user can upload documents to the server. These can then be referenced in the pages. This is particularly useful for non-HTML files, such as images. To reference your attachment, insert *+myattachment+* into the page text; images (files ending in gif, jpg, jpeg, or png) will be inlined.
	Search: Using the 'Search' page, you can look for all pages that might contain certain word(s). A page must contain all of the words in the query to match.
	Help: Pressing this button takes you back to this page.
...	Guessing the URL: Occasionally, it will happen that you know the name of the page you want to go to (even approximately), but you don't know the number and you don't want to try to find your way there through searches or browsing. For these times, you might want to guess using the URL. Simply type the words you remember from the page name in concatenated form after the swiki address; you can separate words by capitalizing the first letter of each word (a la Smalltalk). The Swiki will return the first match it finds to those words. For example, 'myswiki/iWantCandy' might bring up a page named 'The candy I want for Halloween'. Of course, you aren't guaranteed to make a match, or you might get the wrong match; in that case, it's back to the drawing board.
...	Rendering: the administrator has the ability to render the swiki into a normal web site. This is sometimes helpful when reliability and portability are important. This feature is not accessible to the normal viewer, but it can be found here. Note: rendering takes a while and uses up the resources, so it may be good to render when traffic is low.

Editing Rules

Swiki has its own simple editing rules. To link to a page, surround the page title by *s (i.e. *My Page*); if the page does not already exist, a create link appears next to the new name; clicking on 'create' will create that page for you to edit. The extensive list below is the complete editing features; these features are meant to enhance your use, but you do not need them to get started.

• Carriage returns are preserved.
• A line starting with '!'s becomes a header line. The more '!'s, the more important the header is. For example, '!!subject' will show up as '<h2>subject</h2>' in HTML. Up to three '!'s can be used.
• A line starting with '_' (an underscore) becomes a horizontal line. This is often used to separate topics.
• Using lines starting with '#'s and '-'s, creates a list.
  • A block of lines, where each line starts with '-' is transformed into a bulleted list, where each line is an entry.
  • A block of lines, where each line starts with '#' is transformed into an ordered list, where each line is an entry.
  • Lists can be nested. Thus, a line starting with '#-' is an element of a bulleted list that is part of an ordered list.
• To create a table, start off the lines with '|' and separate the elements with '|'s. Each new line represents a new row of the table.
• To create a preformatted section, begin each line with '='. A preformatted section uses equally spaced text so that spacing is preserved.
• To add an 'add to this page' area, have a line starting with a '+'. This will turn into a text area in the view mode, so that users can add to a page in the view mode. It also becomes useful for when you want to stop people from deleting a page; simply add the '+' line and lock the page. Users will now not be able to add, but not delete.
• To create a link, put it between '*'s.
  • If the page exists in the Swiki (e.g., *A Valid Page Name*), a link to that page shows up on save.
  • In case the page does not already exist, the link will show up with 'create' next to it; clicking on 'create' creates the new page and allows the user to edit it.
  • If the link is external (e.g., *http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki*), a link to that external page is placed there.
  • If the link is an image (URL ends in 'gif', 'jpeg', 'jpg', or 'png'), an image reference to that location appears.
  • If the link is an email address (e.g.. *self@mail.me.com*), clicking on it will start sending an e-mail to that address.
  • You can add anchors to places in the text by adding a line starting with '@', such as '@My Section'. You can then create a link to that section using '*' and a '@'. So, '*My Valid Page@My Section' will link to 'My Section' on the 'My Valid Page' page. If the section is inside the page you are linking from, you can omit the page name (e.g. *@My Section*).
  • You can also alias all these links using '>'. So, you can create a link like this: *My Alias>A Valid Page Name*. The link will then show up as 'My Alias', but link to 'My Valid Page Name'. For images, the alias text will become the alternate text for the image.
• Use any HTML you want. Here are some useful HTML tags:
  • To make something bold, surround it by '<b>' and '</b>'.
  • To make something italics, surround it by '<i>' and '</i>'.
  • To make something underlined, surround it by '<u>' and '</u>'.
• In certain cases, you may want to import HTML from another program. To do this, simply put the HTML between '<html>' and '</html>' and the swiki formatting rules will not apply.
• To reference an uploaded file (uploaded using 'Attachments'), put it between '*+' and '+*'. For example, '*+myupload.html+*' will create a link to the uploaded file 'myupload.html'. If the file ends is of type 'gif', 'jpeg', or 'jpg', an image reference to it is made.
• There are three characters (&, <, >) that have special meaning in HTML. Also, the swiki adds two characters (*, @) to that list. In order to have these characters show up in plain text, you will have to alias them. This is the mapping for these characters: '&' maps to '&amp;'; '<' maps to '&lt;'; '>' maps to '&gt;'; '*' maps to '&star;'; '@' maps to '&at;'. These mapping can be used in page names too.