Quick guide

Welcome

Welcome to the new Amtwiki. A lot of you have done a ton of work in setting up info in the PhpWiki, and I thank you all, the process of moving to MediaWiki is labor intensive but there are some definite benefits, including:

Benefits

• Templates
• Tracking accounts - (many wanted to know about who vandalized a page)
• Watch - gain the ability to know when someone updates your page or any other page
• My Contributions - be able to see all you've edited

and much more.

Conversion Tool

Anyway, the Conversion Tool is something I whipped up to help, it does some of the basic conversions for you, but it isn't perfect.

===Key differences between PHPWiki and MediaWiki:

• Internal Links: PHPWiki used single brackets, MediaWiki uses double brackets. The conversion tool does these for you. Titles can be split off by a pipe | character, but are opposite of phpwiki. It goes [[link|title]].
  • Example: The Front Page is done by [[Main Page|The Front Page]]
• External Links: Both use single brackets. However if you use the conversion tool, it will convert these too, so you will have to change them back, as it doesn't knowt he difference (and generally there are a lot more internal links than eternal, so I went with this way). Unlike internal links, the name will not be included unless a title is used. Titles are seperated from the link by a space.
  • Example: Burning Lands / Amtgard, Inc Homepage is done by [http://www.amtgardinc.com Burning Lands / Amtgard, Inc Homepage]
• External Images - external images are listed directly with NO brackets.
  • Example: was simply http://agh2o.org/pix/blicon.gif
• Internal Images - If you use the image button above you can link to an internal image, even if it doesn't exist yet. Clicking on the link of the image will prompt you to upload it. There are many advantages of doing this, including the ability to specify the image size. by putting a pipe | after an image link I can specify the size in pixels I want it to display as. A user can always then click on the image to see it full size.
  • Example: was done with [[Image:wecoronation.jpg|100px]]
  • If you click on the image you will see the full size.

this page looks like of ugly, apologies for that but wanted to get examples in. If you go to the edit, you'll notice I use a tag called <nowiki>code</nowiki> to show code without it being processed.

Categories

In the old phpwiki, we had a lot of pages of lists. A page called AmtgardPlaces for example was a big list of places, or list of pages with more lists. The problem was is every time we added a new one, we had to go update the menu pages that listed it. Or if one was gone, then you had to go clean those up. This didn't happen.

Mediawiki has a far better way to do this, and I would like to get everyone using these methods. We'll leave the old lists up for now, but as time goes on they will become irrelevent.

The way this works is via something called "Categories". Take a look at the age for Silverwater. At the bottom, you'll see a couple categories. Click the first one ("Neverwinter Parks") and you'll see a list of items with the same category. The category itself can have a page, but will automatically list the items in it. That category itself is a subcategory of a category of Amtgard Places, and if you go there you'll get other subcategories matching it.

To add an item to a category you do not edit the category page (indeed if you do you'll only get the brief text at the top). It is instead done from the invidual pages. By putting a <nowiki></nonwiki> at the bottom of the page, it automatically gets added to the category page. So if a new Neverwinter Park were to be added, we just put that at the bottom and viola, its there. I want to get everyone to put the <nowiki> on their park pages (used "Freehold Parks" for parks w/out a kingdom).

Similarly all other lists, e.g. Emerald Hills People, Flame Knights, etc can all be done in a similar fashion.