Difference between revisions of "Help:Editing"

Revision as of 21:42, 21 April 2011

Text editing

The most basic text editing features, such as boldface, italics and links can be formatted with help of the buttons above the edit box. Alternatively, the syntax is simple. For bold text, enclose the word(s) within three single quotes:

bold text

For italic text, enclose the text with two single quotes:

italic text

To link a text to another page within the wiki, enclose the word in square double brackets:

[[Anakao]]

The link will thereafter point to http://www.madacamp.com/Anakao

To link to a page on another website, enclose the link location within single square brackets and the linked word(s) after the URL:

[http://www.example.com example]

This will result in example

Alternatively, type a full URL without the brackets, eg: ...

http://www.example.com

... to display the link as follows:

http://www.example.com

To make a listing, prefix the list items with asterixes: ...

* item 1 
* item 2
* item 3

... which will appear as follows:

• item 1
• item 2
• item 3

Nested lists are done as follows: ...

* item 1 
* item 2
** item 2.2
*** item 2.3
* item 3

... which will appear as:

• item 1
• item 2
  • item 2.2
    • item 2.3
• item 3

etc.

Image links

To make an image link to a page instead of leading to the larger version of the same image which is clicked on, add the link parameter to the image markup, eg.:

[[Image:Big_fish.jpg|100px|link=Big_fish]]

Display email address

The following code:

[mailto:hello@madacamp.com hello@madacamp.com]

... will display as:

hello@madacamp.com

Skype button

To display a Skype button that will launch Skype and call or start a chat to a specified Skype address as well as indicate its online or offline status, first configure your Skype application to allow its status be shown online (if it has not already been configured as such). This is done within the Skype application section Tools->Options->Privacy. Tick the checkbox Allow my status to be shown on the web:

The following example will create a button for which a call can be made when clicked on:

<skype style="bigclassic" action="call">YourSkypeName</skype>

<skype style="bigclassic" action="call">madacamp</skype>

The available styles are: balloon, bigclassic, smallclassic, smallicon, mediumicon

See examples at http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/status.html

The available actions are: add, chat or call

Google maps

To create new or edit existing Google maps on pages, click on the map button above the edit box.

Find the region to display, set the various size and display options and thereafter copy the resulting <googlemap>...<googlemap> code into the edit box and save the page.

Various display options include satellite view, map view, adding of place markers, drawing lines etc.

Adding RSS news feeds to pages

RSS means Really Simple Syndication. It's a standard code format for feeding various news reader applications (including web browsers) with news summaries and corresponding links to articles. For example, do a Google news search at http://news.google.com for any given keyword or phrase. Thereafter scroll to the bottom of the page and find the RSS symbol . Follow the link to the URL of the raw RSS feed.

The web browser may automatically display the news items of the raw RSS feed in a tidy HTML format as well as offer to add the newsfeed to a browser's Live Bookmarks and various social bookmarking applications, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines etc. Alternatively, the browser may display the raw RSS feed in XML source code. Either way, copy the location of the page (URL) and place it within the <rss>...</rss> tags, like the following example:

<rss>http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22madagascar+lemurs%22&cf=all&output=rss|short|date|max=20</rss>

The output of this, which is a news search for the phrase madagascar lemurs, becomes:

Failed to load RSS feed from http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22madagascar+lemurs%22&cf=all&output=rss|short|date|max=20: Error fetching URL: name lookup timed out

Note: Not only Google News offer RSS feeds but many major as well as niche portals do. Wherever you see the familiar RSS button, it should be for a compatible news feed that can be displayed on any page as described above. For additional usage and customisation of the output of news items on a page, see: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RSS#Usage

Images

[[Image:Nahampoana_Main_Building.jpg|left|70px|]]  Align an image to the left of the text...

<br clear="all">

For further info on image display, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_markup

Image gallery

To display a collection of images without captions in a standard size that wlll work well in conjuction with a Google map display on the same page and in the the size of 600 pixels width, copy the following wiki-markup and replace the image names with the images to be dislayed. This example will display one large image on top, spanning three colums with two rows of images below it:

{| class="imageTable"
|-
|colspan="3" | [[File:Photo 001.jpg|600px]]
|-
|[[File:Photo 002.jpg|196px]]
|align="center"|[[File:Photo 003.jpg|196px]]
|align="right"|[[File:Photo 004.jpg|196px]]
|-
|[[File:Photo 005.jpg|196px]]
|align="center"|[[File:Photo 006.jpg|196px]]
|align="right"|[[File:Photo 007.jpg|196px]]
|}

Just add or remove rows as required. Example, as on the Tulear page:

Thumbnail gallery

Using <gallery> ... </gallery> tags to display a thumbnail gallery with images which link to the larger versions of the uploaded images. This is useful for creating quick and easy thumbnail galleries with many images.

Images can also be individually captioned and wiki-markup can be used within captions.

• 
• 
• 
• 

  Links can be put in captions.

• 
• 

  Full MediaWiki
  syntax may now be used...

The code example of the above gallery is shown below:

<gallery>
Image:Ilakaka 001.jpg
Image:Ilakaka 002.jpg
Image:Ilakaka 003.jpg
Image:Ilakaka 004.jpg|[[Help:Contents/Links|Links]] can be put in captions.
Image:Ilakaka 005.jpg
Image:Ilakaka 006.jpg|Full [[MediaWiki]]<br />[[syntax]] may now be used...
</gallery>

Wide images

To display an image that is generally wider than most screens in a sideways scrollable box, typically a panorama, the syntax is:

{{Wide image|name|image width|caption|box width|alignment}}

Examples:

The below example is done by the following code:

{{wide image|Bezavona_pano2.jpg|1800px|Fort Dauphin panorama}}

Fort Dauphin panorama

To display the same image but without a caption, simply omit the caption:

{{wide image|Bezavona_pano2.jpg|1800px}}

To right-align the image while taking up 45% of the paragraph width:

{{wide image|Bezavona_pano2.jpg|1800px|Fort Dauphin panorama|45%|right}}

Or define a fixed width for the scrollbox, eg. 250 pixels:

{{wide image|Bezavona_pano2.jpg|1800px|Fort Dauphin panorama|250px|right}}

Table of Contents

The table of contents (TOC) is automatically shown at the top of a page if there are four or more headings in an article. To hide this on a page, add the string __NOTOC__ anywhere in the page markup.

Displaying YouTube videos

To display a video from YouTube on this site, extract and copy the relevant video ID that is part of a YouTube URL, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OKs7qpJvRI&feature=related and paste it into the edit form as follows:

<youtube>_OKs7qpJvRI</youtube>

<youtube>_OKs7qpJvRI</youtube>

Editing and publishing videos

While YouTube offers an easy conversion process from any original video file format into website compatible Flash video (FLV) format by simply uploading your video onto a YouTube account, YouTube will display links to other user's YouTube hosted videos at the end of your video, often in combination with Google syndicated advertising. To prevent this mostly irrelevant information from being displayed along with your video, you can upload your video directly on MadaCamp, after having converted it into FLV format. If your video has been shot with a digital camera, it is likely an Mpeg, AVI, Quicktime or some other format. The conversion into FLV format can be done using an advanced video editor such as Avidemux, which is available for free download on all operating systems:

Within Avidemux, open the video file, select FLV format via the Video, Audio and Format selectors. Optionally add filters. Give the file an .flv extension and Save Video. Thereafter upload the FLV file onto this site and simply add it on a page, as follows:

[[File:Video.flv]]

The size and aspect ratio can be tweaked like a normal on-page image by defining the pixel display values, as follows:

[[File:Video.flv|300x375px]]

Alternatively, FFmpeg is an excellent and free video editing tool, but requires command line editing, which is mainly done on Linux and OSX systems.

For Windows user's, a nice and simple FLV conversion tool is the Mobile Media Converter. While Mobile Media Converter lack various advanced video editing features that otherwise exists in Avidemux, if all you need is to simply convert a video into FLV format without fancy editing, Mobile Media Converter is a perfectly good tool to convert a video into FLV format. Mobile Media Converter offers various pre-configured size and bandwidth quality level options.

This 13-minute video about Chocolaterie Robert's bean-to-bar chocolate production in Madagascar (in French) was converted from a Quicktime (.mov) file into FLV format with Mobile Media Converter and thereafter uploaded and displayed here with the following code:

[[File:Chocolaterie_Robert_320x240_low.flv|320x240px]]

Adding language switches

To add language switches for French and Malagasy versions to appear in the left column of any content page is simple. For exampe, the following code was added in the edit box of the page http://madacamp.com/Lemur:

[[fr:Lémurien]]
[[mg:Maki]]

Note: Maki is Malagasy for lemur.

The Français and Malagasy link therefore appears on the English version, which lead to http://fr.madacamp.com/Lémurien and http://mg.madacamp.com/Maki respectively.

On the French page, adding links to the English and Malagasy versions is done by:

[[en:Lemur]]
[[mg:Maki]]

And on the Malagasy page, reflecting the links to the English and French pages by:

[[en:Lemur]]
[[fr:Maki]]

If a page title contains two or more words, separatate the words by underscores or spaces, for example:

The language swith codes can be added anywhere in the editing box, for example at the end.

Article comments

To add a blog style comments field below an article, such as this one: ...

<comments hideForm="false" />

... insert the following at the end of the article:

<comments hideForm="false" />

The comments are added to the discussion section of each page.

Further manuals

• User's Guide
• HTML tags in wikitext
• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list
• Displaying images
• How to edit a page
• Wikitable syntax
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:AllPages/Manual:
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Template
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:AllPages/Extension:
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Layout_customization
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ