Tool Seminar:Editing Guidelines
From Dependability
| Overview | | Schedule | | Syllabus | | 2006 Project Guidelines | | Tool List | | Editing Guidelines |
The quickest way to create a new page is to edit the source of an existing page, copy it to the page you're adding, and change it as appropriate. This page serves as a good starting point. Do, however, following the naming conventions, listed below, when you add your page.
If you're more curious to know what's going on and why the template looks and works as it does, the other sections on this page should provide some explanation and guidance. 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.
Basic help with wiki commands and syntax can be found by following the instructions listed on the editing help page or by using the formatting bar at the top of the editor window.
Naming Conventions
Pages you add to this part of the site should begin with "Tool Seminar:". 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 tool seminar, 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.
Navigation Bar
Finally, you will need to include the navigation bar, as follows:
<noinclude>{{:Tool Seminar: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.