OSAF wiki features demonstration

Presented at OSAF staff meeting, Thursday January 25, 2007

Table of contents

If you've got a long document with sections, using a %TOC% tag at the top (or anywhere), gives you:

Wiki help

Syntax help (bold, lists, tables) is available during editing, via the the show-formatting help link above the edit box. The popup has other info include a list and links for all plugins. Many of the features below are provided by plugins, which are documented on their homepage. Remember to use the plugin pages for reference material.

Other helpful pages include:

• TWikiTipsOfTheDay - root for the built-in tips system
• WikiSurvivalGuide - OSAF-specific wiki help, faqs, and how-tos (in left nav)
• WebChanges - list of changes
• WebIndex - list of all pages (with short info)
• WebTopicList - list of all pages (names only)
• PageTree - (slow) rendering of full hierarchy of page parent/child relationships
• TWikiSiteTools - describe many of the built-in/default features, including statistics

Keyboard shortcuts

Most useful to me:

• On any page
  • Control (or alt) E to "edit".
• During editing
  • Control (or alt) K to "checkpoint"
  • Control (or alt) S to "save".

Edit box controls

Grow and shrink the edit box by up/down arrows at the lower right of edit pane. You can also switch to using a monospace font. These settings, and the state of other expand-o-content area are persistent via a cookie.

Jump and search bar

In the upper right are two (new) boxes. Try "demo" in each (but not now)...

In the jump results, you will get back a list partial matches. (If you look carefully; the UI has been improved in a recent TWiki upstream release.)

The search box searches the contents of all pages, so is much slower (sorry about that still) so you'll get back many more hits.

So, if you can remember just part of the page name, then try the jump box.

Customizing

You can set variables on your homepage. Like edit box size, skin used, rollover pop-up data, lots of random stuff you'll be unlikely to use unless you know about it. Documentation for the variables is in TWikiVariables, WebPreferences, WebPreferences, plugin documentation, and the whole TWiki.WebHome^?.

You can also overwrite variables, or set a different skin, for specific pages as well as for specific users.

Jared's homepage has a couple of examples: JaredRhine

Hiding wikiwords

It's really better wiki style in most cases to present readers with "polished" links ("spaced out text") as opposed to raw WikiWords. The general pattern for a link is something like this:

I've written [[Journal.JaredRhineNotes][my notes]].

That is, two parts. The first is the page (a URL, a relative page name, a web + page name), the second part is the text of the link.

This turns into I've written my notes.

The other kind of "hiding of wikiwords" is keeping unintended words from being autolinked as a potential page. If you're trying to refer to FooDAV, and it's saying FooDAV^?, then use !FooDAV. That is, just stick an exclamation point at the beginning of the word.

Bugzilla

Bugzilla's a big part of development at OSAF. The wiki has some features to integrate with bugzilla.

Examples:

Bug:2122	Bug:2122
Bug#2122	Bug#2122
%MYBUGS{jared@wordzoo.com}%	Buglist for user jared@wordzoo.com
%BGQ{"1, 100, 1000, 7500"}%	https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=1&bug_id=100&bug_id=1000&bug_id=7500&

%BGQ{data="on" keyword="hosted-service" bug_status="NEW, ASSIGNED, REOPENED" product="Cosmo" target_milestone="Future" format="| $bug_id | $priority | $bug_status | $short_desc | $assigned_to |"}%

4795	P2	NEW	add version negotiation to CMP	randy@osafoundation.org
4964	P3	NEW	quotas	randy@osafoundation.org
5350	P3	NEW	Enhancement request: Passwords via CMP	randy@osafoundation.org
5662	P4	NEW	Print key server config values in log on start	randy@osafoundation.org
6264	P2	NEW	network backup of user account	randy@osafoundation.org
7046	P4	NEW	Support "down for service" state for Cosmo	randy@osafoundation.org
7055	P3	NEW	Accounts can share email address	randy@osafoundation.org
7226	P4	NEW	Temp file leakage	randy@osafoundation.org
7227	P5	NEW	JMX HTTP/HTML adaptor in Snarf	randy@osafoundation.org
7444	P4	ASSIGNED	Direct navigation to users by first letter on /console/users	travis@osafoundation.org
8227	P3	ASSIGNED	Giving a bit of TLC to the admin console	travis@osafoundation.org

(Sorry, column sorting isn't available.)

Plugins are BugzillaQueryPlugin (protected because it has a password in it), BugzillaLinkPlugin, BugWordPlugin, InterwikiPlugin

Editable tables

You can have tables decorated with editing functions. Just throw a %EDITTABLE{}% tag right before your table.

So:

%EDITTABLE{}%
| abc | def |
| 123 | 456 |

gives you:

Full documentation, with examples at EditTablePlugin

Comment block

Sometimes you want to make comments really easy, or direct them to a particular part of a page. Add a comment block using the %COMMENT% block. So %COMMENT{type="below"}% gives:

There's lots of options for configuration; read the docs for the plugin.

Includes (and thereby, sections)

You can include other pages, sections of other pages, and arbitrary http pages.

Three examples follow:

Simple page:

Enter:

%INCLUDE{"Journal.CalendarScribbles"}%

Get:

---

Status Collecting some ideas about more interesting ways to "annotate" your calendar

---

Straight URL

Enter:

%INCLUDE{"http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/chandler/util/__init__.py"}%

Get:

---

#   Copyright (c) 2003-2006 Open Source Applications Foundation
#
#   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
#   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
#   You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
#       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
#   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
#   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
#   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
#   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
#   limitations under the License.


"""
A package to hold helpful modules
"""

---

Sections

Enter:

%INCLUDE{"Projects.CommunityHome" section="people"}%

Get:

---

• TedLeung (Project Owner)
• PieterHartsook (data gathering and analysis; marketing and PR, www.osafoundation website; potential partner contact)

---

To define a section, you need to use STARTINCLUDE and ENDINCLUDE tags on the page to be include. See more info and documentation at VarINCLUDE

WYSIWYG editor

There is a WYSIWYG editor that works nicely for most pages. Bullet lists are nice to manage (hit enter for next bullet). If you've done some fancy markup, it's possible to break a page, or that was Safari, or we're not sure what. Some caution is warranted.

Text in various colors

It's pretty easy to generate text of various colors. Try %RED% to get red text. Switch back with %ENDCOLOR%.

You can of course drop in straight HTML into your wiki pages, so color and other HTML effects can be used that way.

Nifty graphics

There are a wide variety of graphic and effect macros defined by various plugins in TWiki. A whole list of default graphics is described here:

• TWikiDocGraphics

And there's another set of widget defined by the ominously named SmiliesPlugin

Graph layout (GraphViz)

Just drop in a <dot> block anywhere. So:

<dot>
digraph g {
a -> b;
b -> c;
c -> a;
}
</dot>

produces:

Plugin is DirectedGraphPlugin (examples).

Five more plugins

• TreeBrowserPlugin
• RenderListPlugin
• TreePlugin (examples: TreePluginSamples)
• ChartPlugin
• GaugePlugin

Coming soon

Breadcrumb

We'll be getting it back.

Template-based page creation

Should have been part of this demo, but forgot to pull together a good example.

Cool, but not demoable

In-line diagramming

You can inline editable diagrams. Use the DRAWING tag. So:

%DRAWING{test1}%

produces:

But I can't see the applet menu on Mac, so I can't save.

Plugin is TWikiDrawPlugin

Installed plugins

Our whole list of plugins is at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/TWiki/TWikiVariables#VarPLUGINDESCRIPTIONS

Interesting features not described

• Using the tagging system (TagMePlugin)
• Interesting wiki stats via the UserInfoPlugin
• Setting easy substitution aliases via AliasPlugin
• Use of history and diffs
• Reverting to previous versions
• Differences between save, quiet save, checkpoint, preview
• Hierarchical, nested web areas
• Defining your own skins
• How to create and embed advanced searches. See FormattedSearch.
• Use of TWiki-style categories via embedding strings and searches: UserDocumentationCategory
• Using the personalized sidebar
• Use of WebDAV to manage attachments
• Details of attachment use
• Use of forms, metadata, and database queries
• Aspects of legacy features in the OSAF wiki (Page forms, glossary, Jungle, images)
• Google wiki search
• Use of RSS, Atom, RSSDiff, WebNotify
• Access control: hiding or protecting pages
• Setting up page redirects
• Slideshows via SlideShowPlugin
• MultiEditPlugin is installed, but untested
• SectionalEditPlugin is installed, but untested
• GoogleAjaxSearchPlugin is installed, but test key not working
• That list of contributors was/is provided by ContributorsPlugin

Possibly-interesting plugins that aren't installed

• TWiki:Plugins.PloticusPlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.FlexWebListPlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.ImagePlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.ImmediateNotifyPlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.MediaWikiTablePlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.MultiEditPlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.OrphansPlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.GenPDFAddOn
• TWiki:Plugins.ChildTopicTemplatePlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.EditHiddenTablePlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.EditInTablePlugin
• TWiki:Plugins.TWikiAjaxContrib (demo)
• TWiki:Plugins.YahooUserInterfaceContrib