Getting Started with the mondego wiki

Registration

This mondego wiki requires registration before use. The wiki has public and private pages. Private pages are only accessible for project collaborators/contributors. Once a contributor registers, (s)he will be authorized to access relevant areas by one of the administrators. Normal users cannot modify the wiki but can leave contents. Project contributors have full access in the corresponding wiki space that belongs to their project. All mondego people are administrators.

Creating new pages

If you are new to wikis, you should start from here.

A standard way to create a new page in XWiki is to put a link in an exisiting document that refers to the name of the page that you intend to create. Once you click on the link, you'll be taken to a form where you can start editing the document using the simple XWiki Markup Language.

For example, here are the steps I took to create a "Ubicomp" page and link to it from the "Research" sidebar:
  1. Forget about creating a page and then linking to it. In xwiki, it's the other way around. You first create the link, and then the page.
  2. Click on the "edit this" link on the bottom of the left sidebar.
  3. Add [Ubicomp>Main.Ubicomp] to the list under "Research", then click "Save".
  4. Now click on the newly created link (which shows up with a question mark). This will take you to a page where you can write your HTML code for the newly created page.
(amir)

Parent of a page (important!)

One important thing to take care of while creating/editing pages in this wiki is to make sure you appropriately assign the parent field of the page. A short guideline for this would be, all documents related to a project shoud have a parent page that has the same name as the project. For example, you should never create a page for a project CodeRank and assign Main or XWiki as its parent. A page under CodeRank must have a parent coming from the CodeRank xwiki space, examples are: CodeRank, CodeRank.Design etc.

Read more about XWiki spaces here.

This should not be problematic, as when you create a page from existing pages inside a project's space, you'll always get the page where you put the link as a parent for the new page.

Cases

Be careful that XWiki differntiates between the cases, ie MonDego is not same as mondego.

Scripts in Pages

XWiki allows you to embed scripting in the wiki documents so when you try to edit those documents you might see some crytpic tags or scripts, or form elements. These happen in special kinds of documents such as the left menu you see in this document. For the purposes of general editing, we do not need to worry about these pages.

Examples

Start putting contents by creating links to non existing pages. Example links are given below

  • skb
  • CodeRank
  • CalSwim
  • XE
  • Wiki
  • ...your link here. You can delete the link from here once you create the page.
    • only admins can do this on this page, registered users can do this in their corresponding project spaces).

Using Blog

We also have a Blogging facility in Mondego Wiki. The default blog is the one you see in the main page. To post a blog entry, enter a title in the text field Blog it! seen in the lower left part of the page. (I have seen that if you enter a blog title which alredy exists, you get some cryptic error (seems xwiki blog). If you get this error, try picking a new title to put in this text box.) Clicking '+' takes you to a special form to post a blog entry. You won't get the form unless you give a valid title. The blog entry form is little bit different from the normal wiki edit page. But, it takes the same wiki markup. Just write your post in the 'Content' field and click 'save'.

Once you save a post, an extract of the entry will appear as a latest blog entry in the first page of the wiki. To read the full post you can just click 'permalink'. If you want to edit a blog entry you have to first get to the main (full) blog page by clicking 'permalink' of that blog entry that displays the full blog post. Then you can edit the post there.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the mondego blog using this URL http://mondego.calit2.uci.edu/xwiki/bin/view/Main/BlogRss?xpage=rdf . If you use firefox, like I do, just add live bookmarks for 'RSS blog feed'.