How to edit this Wiki

Authorized editors, i.e. those who register an account with this Wiki, can create and modify the content of existing pages, delete or redirect pages, and create new pages. The underlying "engine" that powers the system is called TypeWriter, or TW for short, a basic Wiki, Blog, and CMS engine which I have been developing for the last couple of years, and which I'm using with a fair degree of success to back a number of web sites. The system offers also basic online shopping facilities, mainly targeted at small to medium retail businesses. The program will eventually be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), but I am not really ready to package it for public distribution yet, so if anyone would like to get a copy of the program they will have to be patient :-)

Here are the few basic directions that you need to learn to use the Wiki capabilities of TW.

Loggin in

You can either enter your account and password in the relevant box, or you may want to sign-in through OpenID. For OpenID authentication to work you must enter your preferred OpenID URL in the registration form when you apply for an account. The easiest way to do that is to follow the link to OpenID located in the vicinity the login box, pick the preferred OpenID provider and then follow the instructions. Once you have chosen an OpenID provider you will always have to use that one to sign into this Wiki with OpenID. At your option, even if you have registered with OpenID, you will always be able also to sign-in by entering your account name and password directly in the relevant boxes.

Creating new pages

Just replace the Wiki page name portion in the current URL (i.e. everything after the rightmost slash / character) with the name of the page that you want to create. If the specified page does not exist you will be shown the page creation dialog, along with a list of similar page names, to help you make sure you do not mean one of them. Page name may contain pretty much any characters, except slashes, as those are reserved to mark the logical portions of the URL. Furthermore, page names may not begin with tw-, which is a reserved prefix.

Like most Wikis, this one allows you to create a new page also by inserting the page name in the text of an existing page enclosed in double brackets, like in [[My New Page]. Note that I have used Camel Case words in the example but that's not necessary as TW links are mostly free-format, i.e. they are free-links in the Wiki lingo, as with [[my new page]] and [[my new page|this is the visible link]]. Please refer to the text formatting rules for more.

When a page links to another Wiki page which does not yet exist, the link is followed by a question mark, again a common Wiki convention.

Pages may be logically grouped in "categories", to help better organize content. The first dot in a page name is the category delimiter, so a page named Similar packages.Starbase means a page named Starbase in the Similar packages category. To create said page you will simply enter it's complete name in the URL, including the cateory. Subsequent dots in the page name will be considered part of the name itself and will NOT be interpreted as further sub-categories. A TW Wiki only supports one categorization level.

Page names are case-insensitive, although they are usually case-preserving, so My Page and my page both refer to the same object.

When you create/edit a page you may enter an optional short page description, a one-liner that will be used instead of the page name in some of the automated listings or views produced by TW. The default description will be NoSQL/Your Page Name but I urge you to at least remove the NoSQL/ part, and possibly the whole field unless you really want the page description to be different from the page name. This feature can be useful if you want the short description to convey more information about the page than the one carried by the page name alone, but it can also produce unnecessarily cluttered listings if you do not use it with a grain of salt. In any case you can change/remove the short description at any time by simply editing the page again.

Page comments

Most pages take comments, so that even non-editors may enter suggestions and objections about the page content. Those comments are post-moderated by me in the quality of sysadmin, as described in the terms of use of this Wiki. The comment facility supports gravatars, if you have got one.

Organizing content

This Wiki engine implements the concept of "categories". A category is a set of pages which names begin with a common "stem", separated from the rest of the page name by a single dot. Let's say you want to define a category called "Operators", containing one page for each NoSQL operator, you will create an Operators.getcolum page, an Operators.getrow page, and so on. By organizing your content into categories you will make it easier for readers to find the information they are looking for. Only the first dot encountered in a page name is taken as the category delimiter, while any other subsequent dots will be considered part of the page name. The engine is smart enough not to be fooled into triggering the categorization mechanism for implausible delimiters like Stem..page, Stem., Stem..., and so on (bugs not withstanding, of course). For example, I have applied this grouping to those pages that do not talk specifically about NoSQL, but that rather relate to general information about this web site, and that I have grouped into the Site category.


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