Help:Handbook guidelines

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This is a page for technical aspects in creating a handbook. It is different from the Help:MediaWiki help policy stuff because this is about the templates and the technical issues in formatting handbooks.

Table of contents

1 Vision 2 Templates 2.1 Experimental 3 Envisions of features 3.1 navigation aids 3.1.1 Categories 3.1.2 Sidebars 4 Shared content 5 Audience Factors 6 Content 7 browsers

Vision

The intention is that the master page of any help page in a given language is on Meta, and that this can be copied without modification (hence very easily, either manually or automatically) into another wiki of the same language.

Templates

• Template:handbook sidebar
• Template:ed

Experimental

class="tocline"

• Template:admin handbook sidebar

/Test pages

Envisions of features

navigation aids

Categories

for admin handbook, sys-op handbook, reader handbook.. any page that has information for said group should be in that category

Sidebars

The index page embeds a template into it, so it appears to be a normal page, the smaller lists of features are appropriate as sidebars, and can be embeded using the Template:handbook sidebar template

Shared content

Handbooks have a diverse target audience. This content overlaps, and

Audience Factors

• Field Experience --more experienced users know what to search for
• Site experience -- more experienced users know how the wiki is layed out
• Sys Admin -- these people are running their own server
• Hacker -- these people are probably sys admins, and they are digging into the code
• moderator/sys-op -- these people have been granted special access to the website, and need to know how to delete pages and do other priviledged stuff
• reader -- these people are searching for information
• editor -- these people are contributing content to the project

• time constrains -- an audience member may have time to look up why a choice was made, or just need to know how to solve an immediate problem.

• viewing equipment -- someone may need to print the content, in which long sequential guides are important...

• language
• learning style
• problem at hand

Content

The commands used in the instructions given to people will remain the same, regardless of the language of the audience. Therefore the commands should make the skeleton of a page, and the language dependant content should be added as the meat of the content. -- but this comes later! we still need to content! in english even!

We Shouldn't strive for full Xanadu project functionality, because that is an extremely complex issue, however we can selectively use transclusion when it makes sence.

Some instructions are common across procedures, and if the commands change globally, then it makes sence to have the instructions in a template... see Template:Fire up Mysql

browsers

(this doesn't belong here, but needed scratch space)

konqueror has spell checking, tabbed browsing, and some hidden options that make it usable!

firefox-pr1 is broken so badly that it is difficult to edit a wiki with.

Really, what's broken about it?

tabs don't work, and there were a few other bugs if i recall, now firefox still doesn't let tabs be written

Hmm, using FireFox 1.0.4 (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) right now, with tabs, works great.