Online Manual:Community portal

The SimpleMachines Online Manual wiki is the SMF Online Manual that anyone can edit. Want to talk about it? Start a new thread in the Documentation Help board here.

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.

Don't worry about editing at the same time as somebody else. The wiki does all kinds of checks to protect us from writing "on top of" one another. And you can always see every old version in an article's history.

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 [[Category:FAQ]]
2. Categorize the FAQs. For articles already in the [[Category:FAQ]], but not in a subcategory, find or create an appropriate sub-category
   • FAQ category names are like [[Category:Install FAQ]] and [[Category:Server FAQ]].
   • Each of these categories must be categorized with [[Category:FAQ]] so that it gets listed in the [[Category:FAQ]]
   • An article can have more than one sub-category.
   • Eventually, we will be bold enough to remove articles from [[Category:FAQ]] and leave them, well-organized, in the subcategories.

Other stuff we are working on

• 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.
  • 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 new pages at Special:NewPages, or all pages at Special:AllPages, or choose a random page. See if it needs any work.

Cool 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.