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Tony's TWiki Hints.

Here are few hints on using TWiki.

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Tony's TWiki Hints.

1. General Introduction.

A TWiki is a collaboration platform - it provides a Web site which try to make it easy for any (authorized) person to change. TWiki is a form of a Wiki - by that I mean it is a set of software which implements a "Wiki", a now common style of application.

TWiki has change control and the ability to upload images and other documents.

Click here to get a very quick intro to Twiki.

2. TWiki Documentation

First - Here is the standard set of TWiki Documentation for general users. Also see the front page of this twiki.

Welcome Guest - another quick intro.
Tutorial - 20 minutes TWiki tutorial
User's Guide - documentation for TWiki users
Frequently Asked Questions - about TWiki

3. Tony's Hints

Here are some things that I found myself to be quite useful.

When editing - use the Preview button often - particularly if you can put the preview into a separate tab. This will quickly let you see which links work and don't work.
Consider using the WYSIWYG button instead of the Edit button. The WYSIWYG button brings up a "What You See is What You Get" editor. This will take a little bit of learning but some people may find it a better way to work. See WysiwygPlugin for details on this editor. Note does not work on Safari. Mac uses can use Mozilla.
If you attach images they can appear nicely within the page.

3.1. Commenting.

You can add quick commenting facilities to your pages. See CommentPlugin and the example below. Such comments will end up as bullet point entries on the page.

this is an example comment. -- TonyFarrell - 05 Dec 2006 - 10:47

3.2. Smilies.

You can use the standard "Smilies" - such as smile , thumbs up etc. See SmiliesPlugin

3.3. Tables.

If you are adding tables, use the EditTablePlugin. An example appears below.

Also for tables - you can use spreadsheet operations. See SpreadSheetPlugin. Note that unfortunately, the EditTablePlugin and SpreadSheetPlugin plugins don't interact nicely - as the edit table plugin does not see the spreadsheet plugin contents, just the values and will put the wrong values into the table (the results of the spreadsheet table calculations rather then the formular.

Editable table example with summing row.

column 1	column 2
1	1
2	2
3	3
2	6
5	10
43	4

3.4. Generating a table of contents

You can enter this tag on a page to generate a table of contents

%TOC%

3.5. Standard icons and images

TWikiDocGraphics provides standard icons etc.

3.6. Tabbed browsing.

See TabbedBrowsing for how to implement a form of tabbed browsing. For example

3.7. Numbered Headings

This page is using numbered headers. A basic numbered header could be done by inserting the following into the header

%CALC{$SETM(nh,+1)$GET(nh).}%

Here - nh is a variable which is maintaining the number. So a typical header might look like

---+++ %CALC{$SETM(nh,+1)$GET(nh).}% Other things.

To get other levels of headers, you have to combined multiple of these using different variable, for example

---++++ %CALC{$GET(nh).}%%CALC{$SETM(nh2,+1)$GET(nh2).}%  Numbered Headings

Here nh2 is the header for the second level. In this example, you want a different variable for each lower level header, through there is probably a SET command you could use to avoid this.

The %CALC stuff here is from SpreadSheetPlugin.

3.8. Tree Browsing.

The TreeBrowserPlugin provides alternatives to representing nested bullet lists. For example:

%TREEBROWSER{"file" title="Main Web Home" shared="left"}%

Changes
Index
Search
this is a very very very long text
Folder
- Leaf1
- Subfolder
  - Leaf3
- Leaf2
Webs

open all | close all

3.9. Conversions from MS Word/Excel Documents.

Some visual basic macros exists which help to convert from MS Word/Excel into TWiki text. They are not perfect but may do the job you want.

3.10. Font colors etc.

You can Change the color of text using some standard names. For example

%BLUE% this ends up blue %ENDCOLOR%

See TWikiPreferences#RenderingShortcuts for details. You can also use techniques shown here to change other font characteristics - if you now your html.

3.11. Drawing Editor

* DOES NOT YET WORK *

You you can just upload existing images, there is also a JAVA base Drawing tool - TWikiDrawPlugin. Just drop

%DRAWING{drawing}%

Into the text of the page, where drawing is a number for your drawing. For example: %DRAWING{test_drawing}%

4. Other things.

Poggle Predictor is a tool which claims to predict how Goggle will see a site and therefore is an interesting test of if Goggle gets through our login prompt. I'm not sure at the moment (24/Apr/2007) that it is working that well.