This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
How to contribute (users only)
Welcome to the topas wiki website!
Wiki software is a type of collaborative software allowing web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. This means that everyone who is a member of this website can contribute to it and is very welcome to do so. Firstly you can go to the PlayGround page and try making a wiki page if you want before editing other pages. Note that some pages (e.g. the manual) are read only. Only registered users can change pages.
Editing wiki pages
Firstly, in order to read this website you need to have a user account, so please click on the login button at the top right of this page.
It is very easy to contribute into this website, just follow the instructions below:
- Click on the page that you want to contribute information to.
- Click on the “edit page” icon to the right of this window.
- Type what you want into the white box and press save.
- You can change text styles, upload images and files and more complex text formatting (see text_formatting).
- The information that you have typed will appear on the page you have edited.
Creating wiki pages
To create new wiki pages linking from existing pages:
- Create an internal link by putting double square brackets around the link or press
in the editor toolbar. - Instead of clicking on “edit this page”, click on “create this page”.
- Then follow the instructions for editing wiki pages (editing_wiki_pages).
Alternatively, insert an external link (
) to an existing web page, so that people can access what you want to contribute.
Text formatting
Use this editor toolbar (below) when in “edit this page” to do basic text formatting, just click on the button and insert your text.
Special buttons in the editor toolbar (pictured above):
- This is a large header, used for titles (h1)
- This is a smaller header, used for subtitles (h3)
- This is a button for formatting macros that you may see (see formatting_macros below)
For help with text formatting go to syntax
Formatting macros
On the macros page on this dokuwiki site, the macros are colour coded. It is very simple to make your macros colour coded too, just read these basic instructions:
- After creating a link to a new macro, put a title, a description (a why) and contributed by.
- Press in the editor toolbar and paste your macro where it says Macro Code (the highlighted text).
e.g. Press 
and this will appear
<code topas>Macro Code</code>
Insert your macro where it says Macro Code.
Word files to dokuwiki format
Text files can be transferred directly from Microsoft word files to dokuwiki format. Converting Word files to dokuwiki requires a programme available for dowload from the internet - http://www.dokuwiki.org/tips:htmltowiki (html to dokuwiki). It needs to be used on Windows (open it with winzip, Use Evaluation version and open the .exe).
Steps:
- Download the programme onto Windows.
- Save the word document you want on dokuwiki onto Windows as a name with NO SPACES (or special characters) in it!
- Click Save as, and save it as file type, web page – a folder will then be created holding the pictures for this file.
- Save it one more time.
- Open this document with notepad.
- Copy all the contents from notepad (Ctrl + A).
- Paste it into the top section of html2dokuwiki.exe, press enter
- The html file will be converted into dokuwiki syntax codes, copy all of this (Ctrl + A).
- Paste it into the dokuwiki site, if it's a large document, it may have to go into several separate pages (e.g. an 131 page document had to be put into 3 separate pages) - for problems loading a page after putting a large document into it ask admins.
Word files with images are harder to transfer straight to dokuwiki and require the help of admin. Follow the steps above for putting text onto topaswiki, but image files must be added to the right folder by admin. Contact admin if you need to do this (they will need to add the folder containing images that is created when the document is saved as a webpage).
Alternatively add images manually to the topaswiki page you have created using this button 
in the editor toolbar in <html><span style=“color:blue;”>edit this page</span></html>.
For any questions or queries, ask them in the <html><a href=“http://topas.dur.ac.uk/unb/forum.php”>forum</a></html> or look at the frequently asked questions link.