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MediaWiki on LAVA!


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I'm very very excited to announce that LAVA now officially has a full fledged, full featured, member editable Wiki. The engine for the wiki is powered by MediaWiki which is also used for driving Wikipedia content. This means it's very capable and powerful.

Many of you have been asking for the capability to create static content that is NOT a forum thread or topic. Now LAVA is providing this feature. The goal is to eventually phase out the problematic Knowledge Base, migrate the LabVIEW FAQ over and expand the content on the Wiki. Currently, Adam Rofer is helping add content related to XNodes documentation :thumbup: . Thank You Adam. This is just the beginning.

I have spent many long nights getting this up and running (and almost crashed the server in the process) in the hopes that it will be embraced by the community. Where this goes is dependent on you. I would really like to see this become truly the best LabVIEW resource destination for new and experienced users. I am personally committed to adding my own content on a regular basis.

Key Points (for now):

  • You need to login to the wiki, however you can use the same login name and password as on LAVA. You can also have it remember your login.
  • Creating and editing a wiki page is a little harder than creating a forum post due to the current lack of a wysiwyg editor. This may change in the future.
  • If you are not comfortable editing wiki content I suggest you see here for some tutorials and guides used on Wikipedia.
  • If you want to start a discussion thread on a specific wiki article then click on the discussion.png button at the top or bottom of the article. This will create a LAVA forum discussion thread dedicated to that article which will be placed here. Empty discussion threads will be automatically removed so don't worry about it.
  • You CAN use BBcode and smilies in the wiki article editing.
  • I've created a few namespaces. If you need more, let me know what they are. For example XNodes: is one namespace.

I will be replying to this post with updates. Thank You all and HAVE FUN! :yes:

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Some ideas for wiki content:

  • History of LabVIEW
  • History of GOOP
  • Biography on Jeff K
  • LIst of all LabVIEW addon's and toolkits
  • Catalog of all LabVIEW ini settings.
  • Tutorials and getting started FAQ's for LabVIEW on:
    • LVOOP
    • State Machines
    • XControls

    [*]Designing good User Interfaces

    [*]What is recursion and how to do it in LabVIEW

    [*]Compilation of all LabVIEW resources on the web.

Any other ideas?

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QUOTE(Jim Kring @ Mar 16 2007, 11:51 AM)

Great idea Jim. I'm getting even more excited now!

QUOTE(Mike Ashe @ Mar 16 2007, 02:18 PM)

It would be nice to see some of the documentation section on OpenG TikiWiki transfered as well, such as:

Yes, definitely!

Let's bring life back to that content.

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Is there any way to monitor changes to all the wikis (or even for individual ones)?

I noticed that there is a watchlist for the main page, but it is not clear whether this will monitor changes for all the wikis and whether there is any way to receive the notification in email or the new version in RSS.

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QUOTE(yen @ Mar 17 2007, 01:51 PM)

Is there any way to monitor changes to all the wikis (or even for individual ones)?

I noticed that there is a watchlist for the main page, but it is not clear whether this will monitor changes for all the wikis and whether there is any way to receive the notification in email or the new version in RSS.

What do you want to be notified of? Changes or new docs?

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Some new features to let everyone know about.

I've added a special BBcode that you can use inside Forum posts to link to Wiki Articles:

This is also available form the "insert special item" menu:

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=5224

Also, as a bonus! If you create a forum post that contains words that exist as LAVA Wiki pages, the system will automatically linkify the words to the Wiki pages. For example:

I love [wiki]LabVIEW[/wiki] and I also like using [wiki]State Machines[/wiki] very much.

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I tried to edit the [wiki]OpenG[/wiki] page and it said "This page has been locked to prevent editing." I could not edit the page, so...

  • how when/how does this happen?
  • how do I find out who has the lock?
  • how do we unlock a page?

Sorry in advance for not just reading the FAQ :)

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QUOTE(crelf @ Mar 18 2007, 06:47 AM)

You need a space before and after the word.

QUOTE(Jim Kring @ Mar 18 2007, 12:04 PM)

I tried to edit the [wiki]OpenG[/wiki] page and it said "This page has been locked to prevent editing." I could not edit the page, so...
  • how when/how does this happen?

  • how do I find out who has the lock?

  • how do we unlock a page?

Sorry in advance for not just reading the FAQ
:)

All good questions however, it does not seem to be locked for me. Of course I have Admin rights but your group should have edit rights on that page too. This is strange. I wonder if the page gets locked when someone else is editing it? Not sure, I will look into it.

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QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2007, 12:01 AM)

What do you want to be notified of? Changes or new docs?

I guess both, but changes is probably something which would probably need the alerting option more.

In any case, I noticed the watch option, but didn't find a way of getting alerts for it. Is there one?

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QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2007, 12:24 PM)

Jim, I created a dummy account with the same rights as you and I was able to edit the [wiki]OpenG[/wiki] page on the Wiki. Also as far as the autowikify feature, you can always manualy wikify a word in the forums by manually adding the tags around it.
Works fine for me too, no lock.

PJM

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QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2007, 12:24 PM)

Jim, I created a dummy account with the same rights as you and I was able to edit the [wiki]OpenG[/wiki] page on the Wiki. Also as far as the autowikify feature, you can always manualy wikify a word in the forums by manually adding the tags around it.

I just tested again. Here are some interesting results...

At first, I could not edit any wiki pages. Then, after logging out and the logging in again, I could edit any wiki page.

Problem solved, thanks.

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QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2007, 12:42 PM)

I don't know of how to get notified for any new pages. If you find out, let us know.

Notification of every page edit is a feature that doesn't scale well. For example, can you imagine receiving an email for every page edit on Wikipedia? :wacko: You would get emails faster than you could read them. A better feature might be to set up a custom email notification when any page that had a title or content that matched some search string criteria was edited. That way, you could be notified of things that you care about.

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QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2007, 09:42 PM)

There is a chekbox to send you email.

That would explain it. I looked at the watchlist section instead of the user profile section. Thanks.

Now I just need to see whether this applies to all subtopics as well.

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