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    • How to use TikiWiki for documenation?

    Posted by xst posts: 2

    Together with a team of developers, I am going to write a set of documentation and manuals for a system. For that I thought of using tikiwiki. But I don't know exactly how to do it:

    • The manuals should be able to link to each other. I looked at the "articels" module which seemed to be relevant but how can these link to each other and is it possible to organice articles in hieracies like the organization in the dictionary module?

    • The manuals should be organized in some hieracy. How do I do this? The dictionary module?

    • It could be great if it was possible to search in the manuals

    • If we, in some way, could integrate the documentation overview on the "frontpage" it could be nice. Can we do this with tikiwiki?


    So, all in all: How do I use tikiwiki to write a (large) set of manuals for different parts of a system?

    Reads: 1978
    Posted by Sridhar Katakam posts: 78 India

    Not sure if this is the right answer. But how about this ->

    Have 1 structure for each manual. So essentially each manual will be a hierarchical tree of wiki pages. If you want them to behave like articles and don't want others to be able to comment, you could disable edit permissons.

    You can always search in the wiki pages.

    I don't get what you mean by linking manuals.

    You can display table of contents (the tree structure) of all your manuals (structures) in the homepage.


    Posted by xst posts: 2

    Thanks for your reply. But I'm a newbie so there was some points I dindn't understand:

    • Have 1 structure for each manual.

    Do you mean "structure" as the "structures" module?

    • As what kind of wiki-entity do I create each manual? As article? As a page?

    • I don't get what you mean by linking manuals.

    That manual A should be able to have a clickable link to manual B.

    • You can display table of contents (the tree structure) of all your manuals (structures) in the homepage.

    How do I do that?

    Thanks!


    Posted by Sridhar Katakam posts: 78 India

    Structures as in wiki structures.

    Screenshot of one of a structures of our intranet:

    Image


    You can place "toc" enclosed in flower brackets on any page in the structure to have the table of contents displayed. Like so:

    Image


    You can display table of contents (the tree structure) of all your manuals (structures) in the homepage. Here's how --> check the reply by sdl

    You could perhaps make use of dynamic variables or content templates to create a top navigational line that appears on all wiki pages and in there specify links to all the manuals so users can jump from one to another.

    Or, have a horizontal menu for your site like:

    Image





    Posted by Phil MacGovern posts: 32 United States

    I use the wiki pages extensively for documentation at my site. I do as siridhar mentions; I use the structures 'module' (it isn't really a module, more of an integrated feature of TikiWiki) . All of the documents exist as Wiki Pages, not articles.

    For example, we have a document that is currently in Microsoft Word. It is composed of 5 chapters (which are designated in word as sections using the 'Heading 1' style). The chapters are broken up into several sections each (using the 'Heading 2' style). We decided to 'wiki-ize' this document.

    We decided on several standards:

    1. The page names all start with a standard prefix. The document is called 'Performance Management User's Guide', so we used 'PMUG' as the prefix.
    2. All chapters ('Heading 1') equate to new pages. Therefore, after the base 'PMUG' page is created (via structures), pages such as 'PMUGForeward', 'PMUGNavigation', and so on are added.
    3. All chapter sections ('Heading 2') equate to new pages that are 'beneath' the chapter pages in the hierarchy. For example, the 'Foreward' chapter is broken up into several sections: Overview, Who Should Use This Guide, Conventions, etc.; which results in the pages 'PMUGForewardOverview', 'PMUGForewardWhoUse', etc.
    4. If a chapter section is further broken up, the '!' and '!!' combined with the 'maketoc' command are used inside of a page.


    This gives us the following benefits:

    • All pages are searchable.
    • A page can easily be linked to another page simply by using either WikiWords or by using the parenthesis pairs.


    We have even got most of our data dictionary online, which means if a developer in the forum refers to a table in WikiWord format (which we already used to name/describe our tables) then the forum entry automatically generates a link to the table reference.

    Send me a message if you want any more hints/tips.