Notes for contributors

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

Quick links: mail names - icons - documentation - sandbox - bulletin to wiki converter - web stats

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. 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 Advice for contributors:)

You can also use page directives (:keywords:) and (:description:) to set header information on that page

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).

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 TTMyGroup.HomePage. You should incorporate links to your sub pages from there.

Each group also has a special page called TTMyGroup.GroupHeader which is included at the top of all your other pages. This should have at least a link to the group home page and an email for contact link. To edit it you 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.

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.

Attachments are associated with pages, so you can have attachments with the same name as long as they belong to a different page. Also, 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.

To upload a document you can either

put a link to it into the page (Attach:filename) and click on the link
- this will take you to the upload page and you can browse for and upload the file that goes with the link
or go directly to the url ...&action=upload (cf action=edit for editing)
- browse for the file and click the upload button
- it will then show you the text you need to put into the page to link to the file
- you do not need to fill in a name for the attachment - it will default to the name of the file
- if you do, be sure to get the file type the same as on the actual file or it will not work properly.

If your attachment is an image, you can set the alt text for the image as well by saying Attach:mypic.jpg"alternate text here".

Use of email addresses

Putting email addresses into web pages is a good way to get spam. We do not recommend that you put any personal web addresses onto your web pages at all. Gmail has very good spam filters so you may like to get an email account to use from there for your group email.

We use an obfuscation technique which means that when you create a link using mailto: the address is not stored visibly on the saved page or in the generated html for the page. This makes it harder for robots to scrape the addresses but it is still humanly readable and therefore vulnerable.

Alternatively, 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

http://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 http://www.transitioncambridge.org/mail-contact/sendmail.php?who=ngt

The list of known contacts is accessible as http://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. At the moment the mail will appear to 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.