Online Manual:Community portal

The SimpleMachines Online Manual wiki is the SMF Online Manual that anyone can edit. Want to talk about it? Join the Doc Helpers Group -- Go to The Group Membership Page of your profile and select "Join Group" next to the Doc Helpers Group.

Whenever you write documentation, please follow the Documentation Guidelines.

Are you new to the wiki?

That's OK. Most wiki editing is actually pretty easy, and it is pretty hard to break anything. On almost every page on this wiki, you'll find an "edit" button. You can click it to start editing. Just plain text is fine! you can ask for help in the SMF Doc Helpers Board, or use the formatting buttons above the editing box.

Starting an article is pretty easy, too. Just see the instructions for Starting a new article.

Two really important rules we've discovered the hard way are:

1. Never create a document with a "?" in the title and
2. Please do not make changes to pages that are being translated. Instead, please discuss the changes, and allow doc team members to work together with the translators to help make less work for everyone.

For more information for new wiki editors, please see New Editors
To discuss the online manual and how to edit it, please see the SMF Doc Helpers Board
To see the comprehensive guide to using a wiki, please see WikiMedia's Help Guide

How You Can Help

Right now, we are organizing the documentation that has been copied from the old manual to this wiki. Some of it, we are recategorizing. Some of it, we are updating to better describe SMF 2.0. Some of it, we are preparing to translate. Even if you have just a few minutes to spare, you might be able to help. Every little bit helps your fellow SMF users. Thanks!

Top priorities

1. Put new FAQs on the wiki, so we can see them in the FAQ Category
2. Organize information about Customizations (mods and themes) and writing code
   • Recategorize stuff in Category:Developing SMF and Category:Developing_SMF and related categories to do with mods and themes. Some documents are over-categorized. Some are under-categorized.
   • It might make sense to use the categories and boards at Into the Depths of SMF as guides to categorization.
   • Finally, we might have some navigation tools like we've used in the Main Page, and a "Developers Main Page", too.
3. Participate in the List of all documents to be moved to wiki
4. Fix up the articles in Online Manual:List of BBC articles to be converted. Cross them off when you are done fixing them. Done!

Other stuff that will need to be done eventually

• Check Category:Needs_HTML_cleanup for articles with ugly HTML messes. Clean them up
• Find articles that need HTML cleanup, and give them the {{Cleanup html}} tag. That will make it easier to find them and clean them up.
• Help improve documents that are already here -- making them easier to read, and adding the new features information that is not there yet.
• Help write help for people who want to help write documentation
  • Whenever you write documentation, follow the Documentation Guidelines.
• See the list of files that need to be created at Category:Please_Create
• See the list of all pages at Special:AllPages, or choose a random page. See if it needs any work.
• Right now, some doc helpers have made it a project to move and checkall the doclinks FAQs. Done! Thanks!

Advanced Wiki Users

• Develop a template for individual BBCode tags, using the format of the Integration hooks page as an example (see http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=412543.msg2880458#msg2880458) -- User:AngelinaBelle 07:30, 16 December 2010 (EST) Result: Template:Wordy Bbc --AngelinaBelle 10:56, 5 January 2011 (EST)
• Figure out the problem with the Template:mbox. It seems as though an image is missing for |type=caution. Figure out the problem and fix it, or post the solution so an admin can take care of it. --AngelinaBelle 12:08, 19 January 2011 (EST) replaced those pesky svg files with png files to avoid image converter problems.

New Tools

Search-and-Replace Tools -- while editing an article, find Custom regex below the Scripts heading at the bottom of the left side bar. You can do multiple search-and-replace, and use regex if you want.

Did you know that the Semantic MediaWiki extension is in use here? It was used to create the Alphabetical list of all bulletin board codes, as well as the Glossary of SMF Terminology. Much more could be done with the Semantic MediaWiki, once we figure it out

New Templates

• Template:Upgrade_FAQ -- a list of FAQs that can be useful when upgrading.
• Template:Code -- to give better formatting to block code samples. See Template:Code for how-to-use documentation.
• Template:For_More_Information -- A standaradized "for more information link" that will not show up if transcluded onto that page (as in a tooltip).

Translation Help Needed

Use the Online_Manual:Translation Portal to post and view information about translation priorities.

For Discussion

How should we name translated pages?

What is the status of the translate extension?