Using Ahatwiki

Friendly native guide (Ahatwiki FAQ)
First things first (AwareNess)
Hey!, I'm starting to get the hang of this! (CompeTence)
Look Ma! No Hands! (MasTery)

This resource is intended to help people understand how Ahatwiki in particular works, rather than wikis in general, although it contains info on both. The topic is very new, and grows in direct response to Ahatwiki community needs, so please let us know what you need to know!!

Friendly native guide (Ahatwiki FAQ)

What's the difference between Ahatwiki and TWiki?

Ahatwiki is a particular installation of the TWiki platform. You might think of it as an instance.

What goes where?

If you want to experiment, please do so in Sandbox

Here's the current thinking on the current set of Activity and Infrastructure webs:

Mutualdiscovery - where materials related to a specific run of a specific Mutual Discovery course or activity go. So if you are doing work for a Mutual Discovery course or putting together a set of Mutual Discovery based materials, this is your hang-out spot.
LabPrimer - where to find and collaborate on materials related to constructing and maintaining a (relatively) small laboratory environment for research and creative work relating to web 2.0 / eScience / science 2.0. A lot of the materials in here apply to other small computing research labs as well, but that is the main focus.
FreeOpenSrc - a place to collaborate on learning, developing and using free and open source software. If the focus is on the language, system, architecture, etc, itself, it goes here.
- UNIX - probably ought to get absorbed as a topic into FreeOpenSrc, predates it...
MPDL - Multi-Perspective Digital Library (phew!) - the theory to go with the practice (FreeOpenSrc) and application (LabPrimer). It's often hard to decide what to put where, because in practice, good theory and practice go hand-in-hand, and flow from being embedded in real-world problems (hence, application).
- DigitalArtsSci - A place to explore redefining computing, probably out to get refactored as a topic into MPDL

When you create a topic, put it in the activity it seems to fit more naturally. In general, you should not put topics in the People web. Many of the topics in the People web are left over from Fall 2008 when we were still figuring out how we wanted to use TWiki, and will get moved into more appropriate activity webs. (see also OrganizingContent)

How do I link topics together?

Topics in the same web will link together automagically, just use the name of the topic (for example, this topic is called UsingAhatwiki) in your topic and the link will be created for you. If you want to use text other than the name of the topic as the link text, you can use square bracket notation, as follows: [[TopicName][link text]]
Topics in different webs do not link together automagically in Ahatwiki (some twiki installations run a plugin which finds topics in other webs for you.) We made this decision because we found that it was important to encourage ourselves to engage in an ongoing process of re-factoring our information design in order to make our content fresh and relevant. We do recognize that it increases the learning curve a bit, but offer extra help (like this FAQ to help. In any case, to link to a topic in another web, you simply need to prepend the web name to the topic name, e.g., Webname.TopicName. As before, you can use square bracket notation to use text other than the name of the topic as the link text: [[Webname.TopicName][link text]]

How do I get to my home page? What is my home page for?

To get to your home page, click on your wikiname near the upper right hand corner of your browser window under the sitemap button. The most common use of your home page is to present yourself to other visitors to a wiki. Some examples from various collaborative sites:

Note the difference between Sven and Michael's pages, despite the fact that they are both foswiki pages.

What should you put on your homepage? It's a good idea to link your work to your home page. Think of your homepage as an online portfolio...

How do I make a separator/heading/image/... (text formatting FAQ)?

In addition to the built-in TextFormattingFAQ, we'd like to add a bit of Ahatwiki-specific info designed to make your life a little easier:

At the top of the editing window are a series of buttons you can click on that will generate markup for you, so that you don't have to memorize TML (twiki markup language).
For images, we use the ImagePlugin which makes including images in topics ridiculously easy. All you do is use the attach button to upload your image and the %IMAGE{"filename.fmt"}% TWikiVariable in your markup. The only required argument is the filename, although there's all sorts of nifty stuff you can do.

Help! The 'save', 'save and continue', etc. buttons are not showing up underneath the text box when I edit a topic!

Are you using Explorer? Some versions of Explorer have a problem with some of the legacy templates from NatSkin that are temporarily part of the prototype infrastructure. Please use Firefox for the moment. When we've moved over to a complete set of validated templates the problem will most likely go away.

First things first (AwareNess? )

MainFeatures - Main features of the TWiki collaboration platform
TWikiShorthand - a quick and dirty intro to TML, the TWiki Markup Language
StartingPoints - starting points for beginners, as well as at each step along the road to getting progressively more involved in our community

Hey!, I'm starting to get the hang of this! (CompeTence? )

TextFormattingRules - a detailed presentation of TML (TWiki Markup Language)
OrganizingContent - how we've been thinking about Information Design in this wiki over time.
about preference variables. Something is a preference variable if it can be set on a wiki page but affects how other pages behave. Preference variables are used to configure plugins, personalize user accounts, and more. -- HilaryHolz - 03 Jan 2009
about topic titles. Sometimes you want to explicitly specify the title for a topic, rather than let the system automatically extract it for you. (titles are used in tooltips, etc.) This tells you how. -- HilaryHolz - 03 Jan 2009
and, of course, TWikiUsersGuide