Getting Started Editing The Revelation Wiki
The Revelation Wiki uses DokuWiki https://dokuwiki.org which has its own special syntax.
In order to create or edit pages, you will need to log in - from any of the Revelation Wiki pages, click on the "Log In" button on the upper right of the page, and enter your username and password.
Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see a couple of drop-down menus on the upper-right corner of the page (they may vary depending on what permissions you’ve been assigned):
The menu circled in red is the “tools” menu:
You can see recent changes (to review them), look at earlier versions of the current page (and revert to them, if desired), see what pages refer to the current page (“backlinks”), and (if allowed) go into the Admin page to control access control lists, users, add-ins, etc.
You can also look at the Sitemap, to get an idea of how all the pages are organized and interrelated.
The menu circled in green is a shortcut to create a new page – you can specify where (in the site) you want the page created, and the name of the page, and it’ll make a blank page there for you to edit.
The menu circled in brown is the user menu. From there, you can go to the home page or the admin page (just like you can on the tools menu) if allowed.
On every page there’s also a right-side menu:
The top menu includes social media links and options to email the current page, print the current page, and make a “permalink” to the current page.
On the right margin, the pencil puts you into edit mode on the current page. The second icon (a clock) shows you old revisions of the current page, and the link icon shows you the “backlinks”. Finally the up arrow brings you back to the top of the page.
So, how do you manage a page? Well, first you must navigate to the page you want to edit/change. You can do that through the existing links (ie, go to the proper manual, and then its table of contents, etc.) or you can search and click on the correct results. Once you’re on the page, you can use the pencil to edit the whole page, or – if the page has different sections – under each section there is a button to ‘edit’ that section:
In either case, if you’re editing the whole page or just a section, you’ll be brought into the wiki editor:
When you edit a wiki page, you should always put in a comment about what you’ve changed. You put a little description into the “Edit Summary” box at the bottom.
The wiki is controlled by an HTML-like (but explicitly NOT HTML) language. It’s all entered via plain text and html-like (or bbcode-like) “control codes”. At the top of the editor pane are little icons to help you add certain codes – bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings, etc.
Revelation Wiki pages typically consist of an overall header, then sub-headers for each section, with text in each section. You can include links to other wiki documents, or external links to non-wiki documents; you can embed images (and those images have to be uploaded into the “media” folder). Tables can be added either manually or with a GUI.
So for example, if you had a blank page you would hit the “add header” button:
Which will put the following text on the page:
You’d then replace “Headline” with your actual heading text. Then if you wanted to make a sub-heading, you’d use the “add lower heading” button:
Which will put the following text on the page:
(Note that the sub-heading has one fewer equal sign on either side – that indicates it’s a “lesser heading” than the first one). If we use the “add header” button now, it will stay at this “level” of header – if we wanted to go “smaller” still, we can use the “add lower heading” button again.
Each page may also show a table of contents in the upper right of the page – it’s auto-generated from the headings, so long as there are more than 3 on the page.
Next, you type in the text you want in that section. Note that you need to have a blank line to create a “new paragraph” – otherwise, text just flows together.
If you want to insert a link to another wiki page, you can click on the “internal link” button:
This will bring up the “link wizard”:
If you know “around” where the page you’re looking for might be, navigate to that folder (or its parent), and you can then type in the word(s) you’re looking for – or you can start at the root, as we are here, and it will find any matching occurrences. For example, if we wanted to make a link to the LOCATE statement, we could start typing LOCATE in the “Link To” box:
And then click on the proper link. That will put the link (in docuwiki format) into the text:
(For those who prefer to add a link manually, it’s open double square brackets, then the “path” to the page (with each directory separated by colons, and spaces replaced with underscores) for the link part, then a pipe symbol, followed by the text to show).
If you want to embed some code, you can wrap it in a tag that says <code> at the start and </code> at the end. If it’s something that you want the user to be able to easily download, you can use the “file” tag instead - <file – MYFILENAME> will give them a clickable “tab” named MYFILENAME. You would end the <file> with </file>.
The “control codes” don’t work in the <code> or <file> sections – whatever you put in there is rendered as you entered it. Note that sometimes it's handy to mark something as <code> just because we want a certain format (and not because it’s really a code snippet).
If you have to use one of the control characters, like the bold, or italic, or whatever, characters you can escape them with:
%%
So normally this:
//italic text//
Would render the words “italic text” in italics, you can wrap the
“//”
with
“%%”
if you want it to literally appear. So:
%%//%%italic text%%//%%
Will appear as “//italic text//”. You can also wrap the whole thing:
%%//italic text//%%
For the same result.
Finally…tables. Tables have a pretty simple format – headers are specified on a line separated by carets, and columns in the table are specified on lines separated by pipe symbols. So this is a simple table:
^Header One^Header Two^Header Three^ |Col1|Col2|Col3| |Row2Col1|Row2Col2|Row2Col3| |Row3Col1|Row3Col2|Row3Col3|
The table is ended by a blank line. If you want to put a new line into a column, you can use a special “new line control code” – it’s two back slashes, followed by a space. So:
Hello\\ World
Would generate output of:
Hello World
If you need to put one of the table control characters IN the table (for example, you need to have Some^Text in a column) you can use the same escape sequence as discussed earlier:
Some%%^%%Text (or %%Some^Text%%)
An important note is that, unlike in HTML, you CANNOT NEST TABLES in dokuwiki normally.
At any time, you can see how your page will render by clicking on the “Preview” button on the bottom. Just remember that this does NOT save your page…
When you’re done with editing, you can click on “Save” and your changes will be saved (and you’ll see your updated page, or page section, right away).
There’s of course a lot more you can do – you can refer to this page:
https://www.dokuwiki.org/wiki:syntax
for more examples, and you can always just google “docuwiki <question>” if you want to know how (or if) something can be done.