This wiki evolved several times from concept to first release and was originally written by someone who is familiar with coding but not by any stretch of the imagination a professional. What I'm trying to say is there's a lot of spaghetti code to be found here, sorry about that.
This page is an attempt to explain to whoever may be reading this in the future wtf I might have been thinking with some of the style choices on the back end.
Other Reference Material
For basic markup information you can look at the bottom of the webpage of any edit screen, so I will not cover that here.
On the wiki's sidebar the "wiki help" link will take you to the documentation for PMWiki
Addons (that I can remember)
A couple of addons have been installed, its been so long I can't remember them by name, but I'll point out the ones that I know aren't part of the standard installation. At the top of each page is a link to view/edit/history/discuss/print for the page. The history link is any text changes to a page and is tracked automatically. The discuss link takes you to a page named "<name of page>-Talk". If you click it a second time it will take you back to the original page. I've been using the talk page to record changes to the related page as a means of tracking rules updates.
Creating new pages
I use this template to start off most new pages:
[[#startblurb]]
(:include templates.blurbheader#starttemplate#endtemplate page="{$FullName}" name="{$Title}":)
Enter body of page here
[[#endblurb]]
(:include templates.related#startrules#endrules:)
include related pages here
[[#categories]]
(:Title Add title here:)
Categories: Put in categories here
Whenever you create a new page, be sure to put a link to it somewhere in the page main.index (aka the Site index in the sidebar). This creates the links at the top of each page (Group/ Subgroup/ Subgroup/ Page name)
Page Layout
I generally start pages with any variables the page will contain at the top of the page (which I only started actively using very late in making the wiki). Then comes the "blurb" section which is the portion intended to be included in other pages with the information, it contains all the meaningful, original text for the page. After that comes the "related information" section, or any reference tables for the page. These are blurbs or sub-parts of other pages that will help give more context to the content of the page. At the end of each page is the title (a variable, but I didn't start putting those at the start until later, so I just kept leaving titles at the bottom), followed by any categories the page belongs in.
Categories are auto generated the moment you link a page to one, they will include links back to any page you put in that category. You'll still want to go to a new category when you make one to put some kind of description for the category there. I also make sure every category is in another category, the topmost level being the site navigation category.
Wiki Groups
- Category - Autocreated pages for wiki navigation.
- Characters - There was a brief attempt to let players submit content about the game setting for the wiki. This is from that. Dan didn't want the setting section to contain factual information, he wanted personal bias from the authors and wanted anything added to be in game information. This was a section for the characters to give autobiographical information.
- Costumes - Password protected group. One section of the encounter codex. The pages in this group contain all the costuming information for each creature. Its important to note the page name needs to be identical in the costuming, plot, and creatures groups for any given monster or the template to display the monster will not function correctly.
- Creatures - Password protected group. One section of the encounter codex. These pages contain all the rules for each creature. Its important to note the page name needs to be identical in the costuming, plot, and creatures groups for any given monster or the template to display the monster will not function correctly.
- Items - Pages related to specific items in the system, generally one page per item. Due to not knowing what I was doing at the time, all alchemical pages are named "<name of item>alchemy" whereas other items are just the name of the item.
- Logistics - Password protected group. Pages related to printing out items for use in game. Also some links to useful documents, like maps that logs wants to have on hand in physical copy.
- Main - A PMwiki autogenerated group, the default pages for the wiki.
- Plot - Password protected group. One section of the encounter codex. These pages contain all the game setting information on creatures. Its important to note the page name needs to be identical in the costuming, plot, and creatures groups for any given monster or the template to display the monster will not function correctly.
- PMWiki - Auto generated pages with reference material.
- PMWikiCA/De/Eo/Es/FR/Hu/It/Ja/Pi/pt/ptbr/ etc - Non-english language reference pages
- Rareitems - Password protected group. The same thing as the items pages but for items that aren't for public viewing.
- Rituals - public facing rituals
- Rules - All the different pages with rules for public consumption. Most pages by default are in this group.
- Setting - anything related to setting in the wiki. Mostly just the worldbook at this point.
- Site - an autogenerated group with information pages
- SiteAdmin - an autogenerated group
- Skills - pages related to skills
- Spells - pages related to the spells
- Templates - pages with templates for inclusion in other pages. Not entirely sure why I put the style guide into templates.
Naming Conventions
- Groups are generally plural, page names are generally singular.
- sections with text that should be included elsewhere begin with a "startX" anchor and end with an "endX" anchor
Specific important pages:
- rules.marshal - This page contains a series of variables for different job titles, in them are the current people working those jobs. Many other pages which reference the job titles include these variables so there's a lot of value in keeping this as up to date as possible. The variables are links to that persons KoN forum page.
Categories: Tutorial Pages