Manual:Guidelines
These are the guidelines for adding and editing the wiki content. If you want to test out formatting then use the Manual:Test Page.
Contents
Page Names
Page names handle spaces without any problems so you would name a page Employee Time Cards and not EmployeeTimeCards. These examples are working with a made up feature in the software called Widgets. This also demonstrates potential issues with naming inconsistency because some words have singular and pluralization forms, e.g. Budget, Budgets, Time Card, Time Cards.
- The configuration page would be named Widget Configuration.
- The employee page would be named Employee Widgets, because to access the Widget information you go to the Employee tab and then to the Widgets tab.
- A summary page of the reports that are available from the Report tab, Widget drop down, would be named the Widget Reports page.
- The page on importing widgets into the configuration would be the Widget Import page.
- The page on importing the widget information that belongs to employees would be the Employee Widget Import page, or the Employee Widgets Import page.
Images
Use PNG images. Images are named in a similar scheme to the page that they appear on but do not contain spaces. For example, the image that appears of the tab on the Employee Main page is EmployeeMainTab.png. The image of what appears in the tab is EmployeeMainTabPage.png. There is no folder structure for storing images so the image names need to be unique, and the names should contain sufficient information to imply the grouping that would exist if there was a folder structure for storing images. For example, all the images from the scheduler start with Scheduler.
Please note: MediaWiki prior to 1.14 used the "Image:" namespace instead of "File:", "Image:" is still retained as an alias for backward compatibility.
Smaller images can appear inline by using
[[File:EmployeeMainTab.png]]
This is an inline image:
Larger images do not necessarily look good inline and can be right aligned and made smaller using
[[File:EmployeeMainTabPage.png|right|300px]]
This is a right aligned image. Note that it starts on the same line as this text because the image tag was placed BEFORE this text.
When you have a header image, text and then a right aligned image, the order of entry is
- right aligned image
- left aligned image
- text
Formatting
The wiki is very tolerant of extra spaces and lines in most cases. You should understand that the wiki is focused on content, collaboration and ease of use.
Spacing
Extra spaces are generally ignored
a b c
displays as
a b c
however, there is one special case. If you start a line with a space then the text is shown literally such as:
This line starts with a space and then I put lots of spaces between this word and this word
The space tells the wiki to ignore formatting and enclose the box in a table. You can also use the nowiki tag which ignores more formatting. View this in Edit to see the use of nowiki.
This
is
not
using
the
nowiki
tag
This
is
using
the
'''nowiki'''
tag
Note that the first example using a space did not ignore the bold formatting.
Line Breaks
A single line break creates a space. For example, the following
A B C
displays as
A B C
If you want a line break between paragraphs then you see 2 line breaks. For example,
Line 1 Line 2
displays as
Line 1
Line 2
If you want double spacing then...
...you need to have three line breaks
Text
'''Bold'''
displays as Bold
''Italic''
displays as Italic
There is no underlining formatting.
Headers
Headers are created by using equal signs such as:
== Header 2 == === Header 3 === ==== Header 4 ==== ===== Header 5 ===== ====== Header 6 ======
Do NOT use a single = for a level 1 header as this is reserved for the format of the page title. A level 2 header creates a section (such as the Formatting section you are now reading) that puts a line under the header. All headers create the ability to edit just the content under the header by providing an Edit button.
Here are samples of level 4 and higher, and bold formatted text for comparison.
Header 4
Header 5
Header 6
Bold Text
Headers create a hierarchy in the table of contents.
Lists
Use * at the beginning of a line for a bulleted list, and # for a numbered list. Use
* bullet A * bullet B
displays as
- bullet A
- bullet B
# bullet 1 # bullet 2
displays as
- bullet 1
- bullet 2
Tables
Use the wikitable style table. All rows start with |- with each cell starting with |. Use ! instead of | for the header so that the text is bold. Use line breaks only to distinguish between rows, so place the cell content on the same line as the ! or |.
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Header A
! Header B
|-
| Row A1
| Row B1
|-
| Row A2
| Row B2
|}
This is the output for the above table:
| Header A | Header B |
|---|---|
| Row A1 | Row B1 |
| Row A2 | Row B2 |
