Difference between revisions of "Manual:Guidelines"

Revision as of 22:49, 10 May 2015

These are the guidelines for adding and editing the wiki content. If you want to test out formatting then use the Manual:Test Page.

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.

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 select tab on the Employee Main page is EmployeeMainTab.png. The picture of what appears in the tab is EmployeeMainTabPage.png.

Smaller images can appear inline by using

[[Image:EmployeeMainTab.png]]

Larger images do not necessarily look good inline and can be right aligned and made smaller using

[[Image:EmployeeMainTabPage.png|right|300px]]

Images should not break into the following section (unless it is a small page and it breaks into the "See also" section). You can maximize the space used on the page by placing the image before any text.

Formatting

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 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 3 and higher, and bold formatted text for comparison.

Header 3

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

1. bullet 1
2. bullet 2

Tables

Use The wikitable style table. Use line breaks to distinguish between rows.

{| class="wikitable"

|-
! Header A
! Header B

|-
| Row A1
| Row B1

|-
| Row A2
| Row B2

|}

This is the output for the above table:

Links to MediaWiki help topics

• Customizing the sidebar

• Formatting

• Table Markup