These are the original emails with which Jason introduced an experimental SCCLA wiki in May of 2005. The present wiki is almost the same system as that experimential setup, so these emails are still relevant.

Lance, Wyatt,

OK, in principle I've set up the wiki, though within the coming days I'm going to a) make it faster via a webserver configuration change, b) upgrade the underlying software to the latest release.

You can start trying things out if you want.

is what we would replace the SCCLA website with. It has much the same look and feel as the old site, in particular, including the menu on the left which loads different pages into a frame on the right. And unlike the "leatherwiki" test from a month ago I've worked on making the colors and styles fit in and on removing extraneous buttons and information. We can freely mix links to wiki-based and non-wiki-based pages in the menu at the left. They will appear to the site visitor as smoothly integrated. (Unfortunately, changes to the menu have to be made at the HTML level, which means either by emailing me or via ftp, but I think such site-structure-level changes will be infrequent enough to not pose a problem.)

I've introduced wiki-maintained pages for several pages from the old site, though I haven't yet copied over all the content. (see "Home", "Leather Weekend", "Contact Us", "Who We Are", and "Other Resources" for examples) I suspect we'll create more wiki pages as we learn how we want to structure the site over time.

To start experimenting, first create a user account: Find a page where a red hyperlink "Login" appears at the far bottom right. (e.g., "Home") Click that text. Enter a username, password, and email address and click "Create Profile". Then, in the "User Preferences" page which will appear if your account is successfully created, choose a "Preferred theme" of "leather-editor" rather than the default "leather". Scroll to the bottom of the form and click "Save".

At this point, email me your account username and I will add you to the list of accounts permitted to edit pages. You won't be able to do any editing until I add you to that list.

Once I've added you to the permissions list, click on a wiki page in the menu at the left (e.g. "Home"). Notice that you now see the "name" of the page (e.g. "MainPage") in big, yellow type, and that you also see a menu of editing actions at the top and bottom of the page.

Click "Edit". Make a trivial change and click "Save Changes". Notice the page has just changed.

Click "Show Changes". Notice your change is called out as an addition/deletion.

Click "Get Info". Notice that all recent changes are shown by date and user with the most recent page version at the top of the list. Find the second line from the top. This represents the state of the page before the change you just made above. Look across to the "Action" column at the right side of the table and click "revert" in that second row. This will restore the page to the state it had before your edit.

Click "Get Info" again. Notice the reversion is another editing event and that no version of the page has been lost.

If you click "Subscribe", then you will receive an email notice whenever this particular page is edited.

To see the site without the editing menus, find the "UserPreferences" hyperlink at the bottom right of the page. Click it. Then either click the "Logout" button at the bottom of the form, or change your preferred theme to "leather" (not "leather-editor").

To get back to seeing the editing menus, either log in or switch your preferred theme back to "leather-editor".

I can walk you through this by phone if it helps -- let me know what times might work well.

Jason.

Also, be sure to choose a username that you will feel comfortable having associated with changes on the site (e.g., "Wyatt" or "Lance" should be fine, but you may not want full name).

Jason.

An addendum to the repost Lance sent out:

The wiki is setup as a parallel site to our current www.sccleather.org site. For now, if you go to sccleather.org you get the old site. If you go to sccleather.org/withwiki.htm you get the wiki-based new site. Real Soon Now (as soon as it's not embarrassing to do so) we'll switch the latter in place of the former.

Anyone can create a wiki account (it's just the way wikis work), but it won't let you edit. On request from Lance I created accounts for Lance, Wyatt, Stephanie, Loren, and Mikeyboy. You'll each get an email shortly from me with a password. If anyone new needs editing permissions just drop me an email and I can add their account name to the permissions list.

To login click the "Login" hyperlink at the bottom right of any wiki-maintained page. (e.g., "Home") Enter your user name and password (once). Click "login". The other fields and buttons are for creating accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords. Once logged in, click "Home" in the navigation frame at the left again. You'll now see an extra row of hyperlinks at the top and bottom of this (and most) pages. These links will let you edit the page, see the editing history (changes, times, person editing) for each page, and revert to older versions of the page.

Our existing site uses frames. Although I don't especially like frames, in this case I've taking advantage of them to let us mix wiki and non-wiki pages. We'll leave old pages the way they are (static HTML) and convert new pages to wiki pages. For the moment, the navigation frame at the left remains a static HTML page. Email me changes to be made to it. Wiki formatting is easy but inflexible. The frames let us occasionally use a plain HTML page for some special purpose. Also, our calendar, hosted by Kevin, integrates via frames.

Initially I've made the following pages wiki-pages:

I haven't transplanted the existing content of these pages into their wiki form. If you want to do some transplanting or make additions, please go ahead!

Just like any other wiki, you can make a new pages easily just by referring to them in an existing page. To make such a reference, run two or more words together with special capitalization and no spaces. The wiki automatically recognizes this as a link to another page. For instance: put "SanJosePride2005" in an existing page. Save the page. Then click on the resulting question mark that will appear next to SanJosePride2005. You'll be prompted to create the SanJosePride2005 page from scratch. In the future, any page including the text SanJosePride2005 will automatically hyperlink to the page you just created. For the moment only I can add hyperlinks on the frames-based "nav-bar" we have at the left side of each page. Email me if you want something added!

Wiki pages are written using a mostly-plain-text style. Please see the email which Lance reposted earlier today for instructions on learning how to edit. As a start you can just act as though you're writing a plain-text email. For instance, separate paragraphs with blank lines, just as I've done here.

That's it. It may help for us to schedule a short phone call so I can walk you through the basics. If you want to do that please email me.

Jason.

Stephanie,

Sorry for the confusion. I set up a standalone wiki called "leatherwiki" for playing with in March. It had no special formatting and no integration with our current site. As part of trying to integrate a wiki with the existing SCCLA site I make another wiki in early May. I suspect you created your account on the earlier one. The earlier wiki also did not require a account to edit.

If you want to use smoorefu on the new wiki that will work: I have not created the account, but I have added it to the editing permissions list just in case you want to create it this weekend while I'm away from the computer. Plus, you're welcome to have as many accounts as you want... :)

Jason.

> Can we implement the wiki interface as our functioning website? I > think that would mean installing a redirect from .org to the wiki > url...

Yes we can implement a wiki for sccleather.org. In fact I set one up a few months ago, cloning the basic content the homepage and a few other pages. As I recall there were a few inconveniences but it worked pretty well in general.

Seperately, if you send me text/edits for the website, I'm happy to post it.

Jason.

> I feel like this will be the second time we went down this road. > We attempted to start a wiki about a year ago. Jason set up > an experiment but it never got tied into the main sccleather.org > page

Just a note on how the earlier sccla wiki experiment ended: I never tied it in to the main page because I didn't think we reached a consensus to do so. But I'd already tested swapping it in as the main page.

If the consensus prefers pbwiki's interface or featureset I can try redirecting specific pages or the whole site to there.

> The challenge will be in getting folks to agree to invest a bit of > time into learning how to use the tool as unless everyone who wants > to collaborate is willing to use the tool it will not be useful as a > collaborative communication tool. That would mean each member be > willing to learn some fundamentals of logging into the wiki, > creating and updating pages.

My fuzzy memory says this was where the prior experiment got hung up.

Jason.

last edited 2006-06-06 08:46:26 by JasonC