Help:Contents

This page is designed as help for Prof. Doyle's group to manage, use and edit this wiki.

About Wiki

MediaWiki has been successfully installed.

About media Wiki

In July 2007, this wiki was initially installed by Lun Li.

The wiki pages were initally set up by Prof J Doyle, Lun Li, Lijun Chen, Hana and Lachlan Andrew, with assistance from CDS

This wiki is to document Prof. J. C. Doyle & his groups's research activities.

2007-2008 Wiki admin:

• Hana and Lachlan Andrew from Netlab,
• Lun Li and Lijun Chen from CDS and Netlab, at Caltech
• Prof Doyle

Using Wiki

MediaWiki has been successfully installed.

• Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.

• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list
• MediaWiki Help list
• The menus on the left are controlled by Mediawiki:Sidebar

Editing Wiki

• Editing this wiki has been restricted to those logged in with an existing "User account", where the "edit tabs" at the top of the page should appear after log-in.
  • You can edit a page or section on a page by clicking on "edit" tabs.
  • After typing your updates to the editing box on any page, use the "show preview" button to preview your editing/links!
• Useful URL's for wiki markup/editing tips:
  • <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/>:
  • <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/>
  • MediaWiki Help list
  • Editing pages MediaWiki Help Editing pages

Wiki support

• Contact webmasters: Prof. John Doyle, CDS group, Sysadmin at CDS

or Hana & Lachlan at Netlab, CS

or contact CDS

Sysops topics

• The source files for this wiki folder name: ___ are mounted onto file server:___ and edited/hosted via web server:___ at CDS, Caltech.
• This wiki URL is <http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~doyle2/wiki/>
• The common CSS definitions can be edited at MediaWiki:Common.css
• To Do page lists tasks and suggestions for maintaining and updating the wiki.
• Sidebar can be edited at MediaWiki:Sidebar. For instructions, see <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Navigation_bar>.
• To change an Infobox template, create a page in the Template: namespace.
• Paste contents from small page onto a larger page by typing {{:small page name}} onto larger page
• Starting a new page labelled [[Private: ___]] denotes private page requiring restricted password
• More useful links for Sysops topics already listed in sections above.

Linux commands

• To view instructions on changing file permissions on Unix, type man chmod on the Linux command line. Then admin can choose which files are w= writable, R=readable etc by admin or group. If in doubt ask Lun or CDS sysadmin!
• ssh to website, then type in cd .. enter then ln -s hanas_site/filename.php creates symbolic link to Hana's Netlab website stored at CS, Caltech.
• For linux users, a short summary of usage can be obtained by typing

  <command> --help

into the linux command line.

Special pages

• Special:Specialpages lists links to pages important to managing this wiki, for example,
  • to log-in/create account
  • to check information about this mediawiki/MySQL/PHP behind this website
  • to view/control recent changes

Error messages

• 404 Not Found is an error message when non-existent URL is typed into the browser, ie webpage not found
• 403 Access forbidden, ie when user is not allowed access to some pages

Create account / Restricting User Level

Accounts for this wiki have been given mostly to Prof. Doyle's group and some Netlab members.

Editing has been limited to users logged in existing user account and user levels have been restricted in some accounts.

See also section above Linux commands, on changing file permissions!

Special:Specialpages has pages important to managing user accounts, for example

• to log-in/create account
  • On this wiki, login as a Sysops user => Special pages => "Login/Create Account" => Create Account, fill in the fields.
• block user

Useful instructions from <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/> and <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/>:

• Administering user rights
• Managing/administering/restricting user rights
• Reset password
• Removing tabs to users not logged in

Upload file

Upload limit

• Know Media Wiki upload limit 8MB

More upload tips

• Upload file onto this wiki by click on "Upload file" option in Toolbox on the MediaWiki:Sidebar
• Once the file has been uploaded, remember to acknowledge the source or bibliography details on the upload page, and ensure it does not violate copyright and related issues!
• pdf, ppt, jpg are formats can now be uploaded to this wiki, after implementing relevant code in LocalSettings.php

Images

Thumbnails

To install software to create thumbnails on this mwiki,

• follow instructions on MediaWiki:Help for creating thumbnails
• edit code in file below, as instructed

  ...\mwiki\localsettings.php 

• ensure the ImageMagick version that you choose to download is compatible with this wiki version listed above
• create folder "ImageMagick" on CDS server IP: ??? C:\program files
• onto this ImageMagick folder, download ImageMagick

Add Images

 ...\mwiki\localsettings.php

was edited to enable file uploading from the Toolbox on the Sidebar.

• Upload image as instructed in section more upload tips above.
• MediaWiki:Help Adding images

Find images in wiki

To lists all the image files (jpg, pdf, etc) on this wiki, click on Special pages on sidebar, then select All pages, then on this page select image in the Namespace box (pull down menu), and lastly select Go.

Navigation

Creating a redirect

Re-directs are useful for searching for specific page by various keywords or other alternative names.

To create a redirect, you must start a new page with the name you want to direct from. Do this by typing the desired name into the search box, or straight into the URL (methods described on Help:Starting a new page)

For the text of the new page, enter the following:

  #REDIRECT [[pagename]]

where pagename is the name of the page you want to redirect users to.

You can use the 'preview' button, to check that you have entered the correct page name (Generally you will be redirecting to an existing page name, so the link should be blue, not red)

• Redirect page to another page: On "Old wiki page" type in #REDIRECT [[New page link ]]

Categories

• [[Category:___]] files page under new or old category, very useful for grouping pages by category!

Side bar

Special:Categories, Special:All articles, Wiki help was added to side bar to list all pages by category and by article - quicker for user to find specific pages.

Other features that could be added to wiki

Case Sensitivity

To make page titles and usernames case-sensitive, added $wgCapitalLinks = false; to Local settings.php

Social networking bookmarks

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShareThis for downloads and adding social networking bookmarks like <http://digg.com/> and <http://www.reddit.com/>

John Doyle's other homepages

• <http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~doyle/>
• <http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~doyle/home.htm>