Novice Guide to the Dialogue Matters web site
: useful things to know about TWiki

Introduction

The entire Dialogue Matters web site is maintained using TWiki technology. I think the most important aspects of TWiki for us are

• Anyone registered can edit anything so if you see a mistake on a web page or want to embellish then go ahead and fix it !
• The TWiki system has the big advantage of requiring near zero maintenance when it comes to hyper-links.
• You don't need to know or use html at least for most things.

The whole point of wiki/twiki is that it is always in a state of flux and encourages people to try things. ie "Don't be afraid" is the motto.

TWiki encourages modification. TWiki web pages (Topics) are meant to be ephemeral. It pays to be brave and try things.

What do the colours, logos, hyperlinks etc. on the web pages mean ?

Our TWiki Dialogue Matters web site has 3 web sections

• Public also called Main
• Private
• TWiki

Public pages are visible to non-registered users.

To make things clearer, you know if you are in the public (main) section, if the left side bar / web pane is entitled 'Main' and has our "eggheads talking" dialogue logo. The private section has a different logo the "jigsaw puzzle".

The TWiki section is more about admin and teaching TWiki itself in detail to new users. Besides these functions, it is not of significance. The current colour bar for the TWiki section is green (no logo). The TWiki Web /section is ABOUT TWiki itself and its use on DIALOGUE MATTERS (and any other TWiki site on the web) rather than ABOUT Dialogue Matters.

All TWiki web pages, that is to say Main + Private + TWiki and not just the TWiki web page section, on this site and most others too on the web, come with a left navigation side bar.

The difference between TWiki "Topics" and web pages is so minimal that you can think of them as the same. Suffice to say, a "Topic" is the content of the page, i.e. the main bit in the middle minus the navigation left-hand-side pane, and minus the top 'dailoguematters' banner picture.

At the top of each TWiki page are Edit Attach Printable buttons.

On the right at the top is the name of the topic and the name of the last person who editted the page. (I was misled/confused by this for a long time since I thought it showed who was 'logged' in).

Clicking WebTopicList gives a list of all pages on the current Public/Private/Whatever section. I added this link to some web panes, since it proved so useful in finding the entirety of topics available for the current TWiki Web section. If you can't see your page, then you need to switch 'Webs', i.e. click on the left pane where you want to be.

Getting Started

If you have registered, I suggest you first try editting your own web page first to get a hang of things. My own preference and advice to you unless you are unduly timid about making a mess, is not to bother with the 'Sandbox' (a scratch play area for trying things). It isn't worth it. Life is short and it is easy to put things back to what they were unless you are completely reckless. Also in the final count, nothing is ever completely trashed, all old versions of all pages are kept by the system and can be recovered if necessary (you might need to ask a DM TWiki admin person eg. MatthewPurver or PaulJustinCharity to help you with this.)

Making small changes at least in the beginning is a sure way to build up confidence. Go ahead and try it.

How to edit a page

Basically for complete beginners, the sequence is :-

• push the Edit button on the page,
• enter plain text
• when happy press the save button (or significantly unhappy, the CANCEL button !)

If you are slightly braver :-

• push the edit button on the page,
• enter plain text
• press preview
• press backspace button to go back to the previous web page
• edit more until you are happy
• repeat however many times
• press SAVE

Advice : I think it pays to make small incremental changes rather that big ones.

A small bugbear is that I can't use the find/replace function from my machine while editting pages. I got used to not having this.

Do I need to know html ?

You don't need to know html to edit pages. You can produce very nice pages without any html tags. Twiki provides some nice typographical support without you needing to know html. If you do know html then that's fine. You can use it too. If you know both html and TWiki, then I encourage you to use TWiki style formatting when possible and html for the stuff that is more advanced.

Basic TWiki markup

The basic wiki formatting I use is

• "---+ This is some Large Purple Heading"
• "---++ This is some medium sized Green Heading"
• " * This is a bullet point in a list" ( note : 3 spaces before the asterix and one after )
• "---" use on a separate line to make a horizonal rule (line).

The colours for the headlines are actually not the default ones that come with TWiki but are ones chosen to fit the Dialogue Matters site design.

I think that's about all you need to know to get started.

Hyper-links, Page Names, and Topics

A great strength of TWiki is the hyperlinks.

Any term (word) that is of the form FirstSecond? (note capitialization and lack of space) and I mean ANY such verbal term in plain text on your/my/anyboby's web page becomes a 'Topic'. That means it references or tries to reference a new or already existing topic/web page on this web site. The little question mark that sometimes appears as a subscript to the right of such double word terms just indicates that there is so such topic/webpage yet defined. You can make it though easily by clicking the question mark.

So in short maintainance of hyper links in TWiki is a breeze. If you have ever used the very wonderful 'wikipedia' (a very large encyclopedia), you will have noticed these too on that web site. In fact TWiki is a derivative variant of the original wiki.

So setting up hyperlinks is much easier than with html and they are less likely to be broken in error.

Final

I found it took a couple of days to get my head around the TWiki concept and organization. I hope this page has been of some use to you and will shorten that time to just minutes. If you want TWiki help then please send me an email.

My TWiki Name is PaulJustinCharity (no spaces because I am a TWiki Topic !) and because PaulJustinCharity is a TWiki Topic already, clicking it will send you to my home page (Topic for me.)

-- PaulJustinCharity - 17 Jan 2006