Table of Contents

Using the Blog Tools

The personal sections of the wiki can be used for any game-related pages you wish to create. One possible use is for a blog-style developer’s diary. There is a set of plugins, written by Esther Brunner that make this easy to do.

First Steps

Blogs in DokuWiki organize the pages in a particlar namespace. When you signed-up with the wiki, a namespace was created for your personal pages. While you could use that for your blog entries, it isn’t recommended. You may want to have other non-blog pages as well. The best way is to use a new namespace just for the blog entries. Let’s say Alice is creating her blog, she edits the page ‘society:alice:index’. There may already be a title, some links to other pages or websites, etc. Somewhere convenient she adds the line: 

{{blog>.:blog}}

And that’s about all she needs to do for the blog to be activated. It’s important that she start the namespace with ‘.:’. That tells DokuWiki to create the new namespace inside ‘society:alice’. Of course, she could also have typed the long name: ‘society:alice:blog’, but why do extra work?

When Alice views her index, there will now be an input form that lets her type the title of an article, then begin editing it. Other people viewing Alice’s index will see just the list of recent entries; only Alice is allowed to edit pages in her namespace.

How it Works

Getting started with blogs and DokuWiki is very simple, but there’s a lot of flexibility. There are many plugins that work together. The available plugins are:

There’s also a plugin for comments, but it isn’t installed on this wiki.

Blog

http://www.wikidesign.ch/en/plugin/blog/start

This plugin creates the lists of articles. It uses the Include and Pagelist plugins to actually display the pages. You can also show only pages that include a particular tag. 

{{blog>namespace}}
{{blog>namespace?number}}
{{blog>namespace tags}}
{{blog>namespace tags?number&flags}}
namespace
Where to look for pages, and where to create new ones. You should use a name inside your personal namespace.
number
The number of articles to show.
tags
A list of tags that pages must have. Type a space between each tag. You can also exclude pages by typing ‘-’ before a tag: +good -bad
flags
A list of options that are passed to the Include plugin. Type an ampersand (‘&’) between options. A useful option is ‘firstseconly’ to only show the first section of an article, instead of the entire contents.

Older articles can be listed in an archive index. Archive lists use the Pagelist plugin and are more compact. 

{{archive>namespace?*}}
{{archive>namespace?YYYY-mm}}

The number of entries to display can be ‘*’ to list all pages, or a date to show pages created during a certain month. The date is a 4-digit year and a 2-digit month.

You can also use tag filters and options like the blog syntax. Options are passed to the Pagelist plugin and can include column names.

Include

http://www.wikidesign/en/plugin/include/start

The display the recent articles, DokuWiki needs to be able to read a different page and insert it into the current one. This can be useful outside of blogs as well, so it is a separate plugin with its own syntax. 

{{page>page}}
{{page>page&flags}}
{{page>namespace:page}}
{{page>page#section}}
{{page>namespace:@USER@}}

When you name a section, then only that part of the page is included. The ‘@USER@’ will be replaced with the name of whoever is viewing the page. Other replacements that can be made are ‘@NAME@’, ‘@GROUP@’, ‘@YEAR@’, ‘@MONTH@’, and ‘@DAY@’.

The page can also be nested in a lower heading level using ‘{{section>}}’ instead of ‘{{page>}}’.

Flags are:

footer
Show information about the page.
nofooter
Do not show the information footer.
firstseconly
Just include the first section.
fullpage
Include the entire page.

Pagelist

http://www.wikidesign/en/plugin/pagelist/start

Archives of blogs are displayed as a brief table or list. You can use page lists outside of blogs. 

<pagelist flags>
  * [[link]]
  * [[link|title]]
  * [[link|{{image}}]]
  * [[link|{{image|caption}}]]
</pagelist>

The list items can’t have anything other than a page link.

Flags are:

default
Use the default table style.
table
Use a plain table.
list
Use a list.
header
Display the column names in table mode.
noheader
Do not show column names in tables.

Flags can also include column names that should be displayed. Column names are ‘page’, ‘date’, ‘user’, ‘desc’, ‘comments’, ‘tags’. If you type ‘no’ before the name (i.e. ‘nocomments’) then it will be hidden.

Meta

http://www.wikidesign/en/plugin/meta/start

This plugin lets you add extra descriptive information to a page. Although it isn’t visible, the information is used by the server software. 

~~META:name=value~~
~~META:name1=value1&name2=value2~~

Tag

http://www.wikidesign/en/plugin/tag/start

Like the Meta plugin, this lets you describe a page. But you can only use simple words. On the other hand, tags are made visible and can be used for organizing a blog. 

{{tag>tags}}
{{tag>tag1 tag2}}

An list of tagged pages can be shown in a topic index. 

{{topic>tags}}
{{topic>namespace?tags}}
{{topic>tags&flags}}

The tag list can include and exclude tags like when listing blog pages. The flags are passed to the Pagelist plugin.

Feed

http://www.wikidesign.ch/en/plugin/feed/start

The most useful element of blogging is using RSS feeds to track articles. Add a feed link to your page to let readers subscribe to changes from your blog. 

{{blogfeed>namespace?count|title}}
{{topicfeed>namespace?tag|title}}
{{tasksfeed>namespace?status|title}}
{{editorfeed>namespace?user|title}}