Dependability Reading Group:Editing Guidelines
From Dependability
| Overview | | Schedule | | Syllabus | | Editing Guidelines |
There are some guidelines that I want you to follow when adding pages to the Dependability Reading Group. They're in place mostly to support design decisions I have made for the remainder of this section of the site, and to support the outward-facing nature of the site.
Contents |
Naming Conventions
Pages you add to this part of the site should begin with "Dependability Reading Group:". The colon is important, as it sets off the "section" of the site, if you will, from the name of the article. It makes it easy to tell, at a glance, that a particular page belongs to the reading group, as opposed to some other part of the dependability website.
Please avoid punctuation in your article names, as much as possible. They tend to get expanded to ugly character codes in the links (although they appear correctly in the title of the page). As little as they add, the ugliness we can avoid makes not using them worthwhile.
Header
Category Tag
The beginning of every page in this section should start with a Category tag:
[[Category:Courses]]
This will put the page under the Courses category on the website, allowing viewers to find all pages related to courses taught by the dependability group.
No Edit Section
After the Category tag, you should include the directive
__NOEDITSECTION__
This directive prevents an edit link from appearing on every section of the page (if you section the page at all). We want these links to not appear because the general public who visit the page are not allowed to edit content anyway; they shouldn't be presented with links they cannot use.
Navigation Bar
Finally, you will need to include the navigation bar, as follows:
<noinclude>{{:Dependability Reading Group:Navbar}}</noinclude>
The "noinclude" tags are important, because they prevent the navbar from appearing when pages are embedded in other pages. I use this embedding feature heavily in the course website, so that the pages you write about your talks can appear in the "current reading" boxes on the Schedule and Overview pages.
Posting Readings
If you are giving a talk or just want to put some references to documents you think that people will find useful for understanding the material you post, you should use the template I've created for posting such material. The command:
{{reading|link|text}}
will create a nicely formatted, indented paragraph with an icon of a PDF document, the link below it, and the text you supplied to the right. For example:
{{reading|http://chacs.nrl.navy.mil/publications/CHACS/2004/
2004heitmeyer-FESCA04.pdf|Managing Complexity in Software Development
with Formally Based Tools" by Constance Heitmeyer.}}
(entered without the newlines) generates the following:
 link
| Managing Complexity in Software Development with Formally Based Tools" by Constance Heitmeyer. |
Using the template not only makes it faster for you to post readings, but most importantly allows me to change the way posted readings will look, since the layout is embedded in the template and not in your page.