Notes for contributors

NB. Before making any contributions to the website, you must have read and understood the site Terms and Conditions.

Editing wiki pages

This website is a wiki and you can edit the pages by using the Edit link at the top and bottom of each page. You will be asked for your username and password, the first time in each session. If you do not know it, please contact the webmaster for a reminder. Also, in order that the wiki can recognise you during the session you must allow it to store at least a session cookie.

General advice from pmwiki about editing pages is available from the pmwiki documentation pages and you are very welcome to try things out in the sandbox which is there for you to experiment in. However, you should also read about the styles we have set up for use on this Wiki - such as how to get text boxes, highlights and how to get the responsive layout that changes according to the size of your browser. This is described here. You will notice that if you create a page you get a choice of templates. These have some basic layout directives already.

When you make a change, the difference you have made is recorded against your name in the page's edit history. Other people who have access to edit the page will be able to see this history.

Since changes become live instantly, and to avoid clogging up the page history, you might like to click on Preview before Save. You then have to scroll down to see what the page looks like and if you have mistyped a link or something minor it should be reasonably obvious.

Remember when you add content to the site that all information will be clearly visible to anyone anywhere in the world, and may still be visible in the page's edit history even if you decide to delete it later. It may also be indexed by search engines and copied to other web sites anywhere in the world, including being permanently archived by the British Library.

Page heading examples

If you look at an existing page you will see what we have been doing to put in the page title. For example (:title This is a title :)

Icons and pictures

It is nice to use icons and pictures, to brighten up your pages. Ideally they should convey information as well - as in the use of icons on the Events page to indicate the category of event, or to set a mood as in the pictures on the Grow your own Vegetables page. You are welcome to use any of the icons from the standard icons page - and you might consider adding your own (if you don't have permission to edit that page send them to an administrator). Pictures in the form of jpg, png and giff can be uploaded for use on any page (see below).

However, if you have large images on your page this can make it very slow to load. Your digital camera might take photos with millions of pixels, several Mb in size. This is far too big for a web page. Even if you specify a smaller size to display the image your readers will still have to load the whole picture before scaling it. So, you should reduce the size of the picture before you upload it to the page. Ideally it should be no more than 50 Kb. Here is some guidance on how to reduce image sizes.

The links pages

If you try to edit one of these, you will see they include some template pages. You need to edit TT.LinksCategories to add a category and the new page needs to be structured the same as the others so it is best to copy one of them to start from.

Page groups

The main page of each group is called MyGroup.HomePage. You should incorporate links to your sub pages from there.

Each group also has a special page called MyGroup.SideBar which appears on the left when any of your pages are shown. This normally includes MyGroup.Navigation which has a list of links including at least the group home page and an email for contact link. To edit either of these will have to type the url into your browser directly because there is no direct link to it from a page.

You will not normally have access to editing the other pages of the wiki: only those in your group.

Uploading pictures and associated documents.

Attachments are associated with pages, so you can have attachments with the same name as long as they belong to a different page. However you can reference attachments for another page if necessary.

  • The simplest way to upload a document is using the attach tab.
    • Click on 'Attach' (instead of 'Edit')
    • Click on 'Choose file', browse for the file and click the upload button.
    • You can then refer to the file on the page, for example in a link as [[myfile->Attach:myfile.pdf]]
  • You do not need to fill in a name for the attachment - it will default to the name of the file. However, the file name must not have spaces in it. If there are spaces in the name, either change the name before uploading or specify a different name when you upload.
  • If you change the name be sure to keep the extension (e.g. .pdf, .jpg). If you change the extension the file will not be interpreted correctly by browsers.
  • The wiki is configured to allow uploads for a very restricted set of file types: jpg, jpeg, png, giff, pdf and ps files and plain text only.
  • Also there is a size restriction which is currently 1 Mb. The size and type restrictions can be relaxed for particular pages - just ask the webmaster to set up the configuration if you think you need this, for example for a high-resolution poster. However for most pictures embedded in a web page you should not need more than 50 Kb or at most 100 Kb. Here is some guidance on how to reduce image sizes.

There is more about formatting images here.

Use of email addresses

Putting email addresses into web pages is a good way to get spam. Our policy is to not put any personal web addresses onto web pages at all. Instead, you can get put the email address into the 'mail database' so that people can send messages using a contacts form. This database is not anywhere in the website itself. The form is accessible as

https://www.transitioncambridge.org/mail-contact/sendmail.php?who=xxx

where xxx depends on who the message is for. For instance for Nicola, you can send to https://www.transitioncambridge.org/mail-contact/sendmail.php?who=ngt or https://www.transitioncambridge.org/mail-contact/sendmail.php?who=ngt&subject=testing

The list of known contacts is accessible as https://www.transitioncambridge.org/mail-contact/listmailnames.php

If the person you want is not already in the database you can use the link on that page to get to the form for adding in entries.

Using this mechanism, the sender does not see the email address when they submit their message. Obviously they have to enter their own address which the receiver will be able to reply to using normal mail and if they choose to do so then they will reveal their address to the original message sender. It is possible that robots will follow the link and fill in the form to send a message although there is some protection against this. If you receive a suspicious looking message we advise that you do not reply to it.

There will be a delay between submitting the message form and having the mail sent which is usually up to 30 minutes. The mail will come from webmaster@transitioncambridge.org but the sender's email will be in the message and in the Reply-To header.

Forms

It is now possible to put a form on a page with custom fields which, when posted, sends an email to a designated recipient. The email addresses are handled using the email address database as above. For more details, go to the Sample Form page

Sandbox

This is a place where you can play with changing a page without worrying about messing up the real thing. Just copy and paste the page into this one.

Access Statistics

If you want to see how often your pages are being accessed, you can try the web statistics page. The queries run on web access data which has been processed and uploaded into our database. We usually do this at least monthly but there is always a delay. If you particularly want recent data you can always ask the webmaster to bring it up to date - it only takes a few minutes.

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