The Simple Texts Project

Templates are premade bits of text (and/or code) that are stored somewhere, like a subroutine. When you "call" that template, what you effectively do is copy all the text/code from that template into wherever it's being called to.

I'll see what I can do about putting up some help pages explaining various kinds of formatting. What that would essentially be, though, is copy-pasting from that Duke Nukem wikia (at least for the start).

Give me a while to think up some way to present everything, and then I'll go about making things look nice.
 
Take a look at the some of the links on the main page before we remove them. There's some additional downloads to go with MediaWiki that might be useful to the project that I can install as well. Like, I briefly got to look at them last night, but I saw something that handled auto parsing of certain links. If you see anything else there that might be helpful, let me know.
 
I've got an RSS feed that will allow a nice-looking short list of recently edited pages (see the main page of the Duke Nukem wiki, bottom right for an example). An extension needed to allow it to work needs to be installed somehow. Check the Main Page of the Wiki.

I'm not entirely sure what that auto parsing thing you mentioned does.
 
I think it might auto-link words in an article if there is an existing article in the Wiki with that name. I need to check to be sure, but that sounds like it.

If you need any imagery, let me know. We can probably do whole lot with the Wiki then I initially realized.
 
Quite possibly. I suppose enabling file uploads would be a good idea (it's disabled by default). And a nice little banner for the STP would be nice too, if you feel up to making one.

As for additional downloads (I presume you mean extensions), I have no idea. There seem to be so very many ways of customising your Wiki. For example, there's one customisation (not extension) that disables the Save Page button in the edit page, which forces you to Preview it first, which might be handy.

I'm not sure I'm impressed by auto-parsing, if what you say is what it does (I don't know where to look to see its documentation).

I noticed that the byte differences in the Recent Changes page weren't coloured (i.e. green text means an overall addition of x characters, and red text means an overall removal of x characters), but the pages I looked at suggested they should be. Can you look into that?
 
I tried messing around with a template or two, to see if I could come up with at least a basic way to lay out some card information, and after hours and hours of puzzling over endless help pages I decided (discovered) that you've got no parser hooks at all. What that means is that my code is right, but our Wiki just can't understand it (yet).

If you look at "Special Pages" -> "Version", you'll see all the extensions that Wiki has. Ours currently only has one, which is the one that allows us to log on automatically from this forum. If you browse other Wikis, you'll see what they have, and perhaps you can decide to get the most popular ones.

I had a quick browse over a couple, and I've picked out a few extensions I'd like to see added, plus some I thought you might like the look of:
  • Editcount
    • Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
  • Makesysop
    • Tim Starling
  • MostPopular Articles
    • Moli <moli at wikia.com>
  • MostPopular Pages
    • Moli <moli at wikia.com>
  • ParserFunctions
    • Tim Starling
  • RSS feed extension
    • mutante, Duesentrieb, Rdb, Mafs, Alxndr
The most important ones are the last two. The first (Editcount) just calculates the number of edits a particular user has made, which can be called with some code (it's bragging rights, nothing more, I think). The other three I'm not sure about, but you might find them interesting.


Also wanted:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools

Go into "Special Pages" -> "System messages", and search for "edittools". The one on our Wiki is blank and protected, but I suspect you (Digital Jedi) can edit it. Copy and paste the contents of the above link, I suppose. It'll add the box full of symbols and code below the Edit Box on every Edit Page, and thus provide a much easier way to insert some particular bits of code and symbols.
 
Okay, I think the biggest thing for me right now is I'm not as familiar with wiki:Speak as I need to be. This is just a matter of me familiarizing myself more with what does what. For example, I'm not entirely clear on what the difference between a Sysop and Bureaucrat is, but I've granted you permissions as both in any event.

From the documentation I'm reading, the RSS should be on by default. I'll see if adding the toggle variable will affect that at all. I should have those parser functions in shortly.
 
Incidentally, here's the complete list of extensions I can add to MediaWiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:AllPages/Extension: (be sure to include that semi-colon if you use that link elsewhere.)

The Sysop extensions where all deprecated because that functionality is core in MedaWiki since 1.11. Now the parsers are confusing me just a bit. The only one I'm seeing offhand are the AlternateSyntaxParsers which uses syntax from a third party developer. It's possible that's something widely used. Also, Bullet Feed sounds like what you where referring to for the RSS feed.

Some of the stuff I see that really interests me from looking though are Annotation, AjaxQueryPages, CategoryOnUpload, CategoryHook, CategoryCloud... Really, there's a quite a few things here that are useful.
 
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Cripes, Web Expression did it to me again. I may have to reinstall this since the stupid web editor I used corrupted the LocalSettings.php file. I usually remember not to open them in Web Expression, instead of Dreamweaver. Gah! This happens everytime I do a step config edit in that program. I can't understand what it's auto formatting when I open a dang PHP file that I don't see, but it screws me everytime. The only problem here is that LocalSettings.php is web generated, so I can't get the original content back without reinstalling. Stupid!
 
Okay, I had an extra copy I had forgotten I download that night before I did my final configuration. Where good on that end. I've set the RSS variable to true to see if that would help with the feeds. For some reason, the Bullet Feed is causing a configuration error.
 
RSS:
If you look at the main page you'll see two attempts at getting an RSS feed of the recently changed pages. The top one is what Mediawiki itself allows, but as you can see that's way too cluttered. I'd rather have it show only a bulleted list of the last 5 pages (page names only). I know it works on the Duke Nukem wiki, and as far as I can tell the extension that allows this is this one - it's designed to show the RSS feed on a Wiki page, which I suspect is the key difference.


AlternateSyntaxParser:
That looks like it allows the use of alternate writing languages, rather than adding in those extra parser functions. It may not be something I'd use, but you can add it in if you want.


ParserFunctions:
Adds in logical expressions, which is really useful for designing good-looking tables (in particular, it allows certain parts of the table to be removed if a particular parameter isn't specified, so you're not left with blank spaces where a parameter should go). Here it is (although maybe the extended version of that extension might be better, because it adds some more options).


BulletFeed:
That seems to display general news items and activity, rather than just showing the most recently changed pages. If you think you want it, then go ahead and install it, but I don't think it'll do what I want it to do. (Of course, we may eventually decide we don't need a list of the recently changed pages anyway. I don't know.)


CharInsert:
I also highly recommend this extension. It allows that Edittools thing I mentioned at the end of my last post to work properly. Once you install this extension, I can take care of the edittools thing (thanks to my newfound admin powers on the Wiki - thanks for that, by the way).



I'll take a look at that list of extensions some time. I know very little about how the Wiki runs in the background (i.e. your second previous post made little sense to me), but I think I can find some useful things anyway.
 
It seems I can't log in to the Wiki. The main page is http://www.cogonline.net/forums/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page, but after I log in on the Wiki (it's forgotten that I chose to always stay logged in, for some reason), it redirects me to http://www.cogonline.net/wiki/Main_Page, which doesn't exist.

I have a bookmark to the Wiki directly, but I've also tried clicking the link to it from this thread, and in both cases I'm not logged in.

Anything you can do? Also, have you figured out what's up with the extensions? Or perhaps you've been too busy to worry about them.
 
I can't log in either. I'm currently seeking support with the integration to see what the issue may be. I think I'm missing a variable in the login file, which went missing for no apparent reason.

Well, maybe not "no" reason. Maybe because I kept screwing up the install of the aforementioned extensions.
 
Perhaps a clean reinstall of the whole Wiki is needed, to get everything back to factory settings. Remember to save the information on its pages first, though (or let me know to do it).

Oh, and if you do do a clean reinstall, then rename it to "COG Wiki" or something, instead of "Simple Texts" as it is at the moment. I'm sure it can be useful for more than just the STP.
 
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Maybe go ahead and save your work. The database should retain the information. But just in case, it's better to plan ahead. Just let me know when you get around to it. I've been swamped with multiple projects lately.
 
I've saved it all. The regular pages (except for the "test" page you made), the templates and a few other things too.
 
I'm not really sure what I did other then reestablish some edits, but it appears to be fixed, at least on my end. Let me know if you still have trouble.


EDIT: Perhaps I spoke too soon. I'm logged in, but can't seem to edit anything.
 
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