continued

Upload an image to wiki

Start the process of adding an image to the page by clicking on the "Upload file link in the left sidebar.

Take a moment to read through the explanatory verbiage on the page, and then scroll down to the short functional form lower down on the upload page. Use the "Choose File" or "Browse" button to find the photo you'd like to upload on your local disk, and fill out the other form fields.

Especially the first time you do this at Archiplanet - as you should whenever you're posting an image to an online collection - take a moment to consider and select the licensing option that best meets your needs:

When the fields and licensing menu options are all set to your satisfaction, then click the "Upload File" button at the bottom of the form area, and you should see your image appear on its own wiki page, something like this:

Connect the image to the building page

Now we want to connect this newly uploaded building photo into the building page itself.

While you're still looking at the image page, where it appears immediately after uploading, select the whole image file name, wiki-style from just to the left side of "Image:" all the way through the file extension of ".jpg", and copy that text to your clipboard. Hang on to that for a moment.

Return to the building page we recently created, with its now-familiar formatting and text:

Then click on the little "edit" tab link at the top of the information box, to open the page back into editing mode again:

Scroll down slightly until you can see the "==Images==" section heading, already inserted automatically as part of the Add a Page process.

On an open line just below the "==Images==" section heading, type <gallery>, and then, on a new line paste in the file name you have copied to the clipoard from the upload results page where you saw the image, and then on another line type </gallery>, so you end up with a new line in the editing box that looks something like:

<gallery>
Image:first_building_photo.jpg
</gallery>

depending on the actual name of your image in the wiki.

As you might imagine, there are several different ways to place an image into a wiki page. We use the <gallery> </gallery> method in the Images section of Archiplanet building pages because it makes it so quick and simple to create an array of image thumbnails, each automatically linked to its larger version.

Add a summary thumbnail

Now, for a really cool page, we can earlly easily add a building thumbnail to the Building Info summary block.

To do this, for the first or best image only, also paste the image name, minus the "Image:" part, into the Building Info template at the "building_image=" line:

Now, click the "Save page" button, handle the captcha spam prevention, and with a bit of luck you'll see something like this:

Pretty cool!

Add more images to the page

To add more images to the building page, repeat the image upload step for each.

When you get to the link-image-in-page step, it's even easier for each additional image. Since the <gallery> </gallery> tags are already in place, you just need to add a line to the gallery list for each image, like:

<gallery>
Image:first_building_photo.jpg
Image:next_building_photo.jpg
Image:another_building_photo.jpg
</gallery>

When you save the building page with more image files uploaded and linked in, it should look something like this:

That page is starting to look pretty good now. It's starting to both show and tell us something about this building.

And that's a good stopping place for this session. Congratulations!

Next Steps

Part Two of this tutorial will continue the process of adding elements to the case study page, developing the wiki page into an increasingly a rich and interactive community resource.

We hope using the familiar example of creating a building case study, or precedent study, will resonate for seasoned practitioners by illustrating how the well-known aspects of a familiar task can be manifested in this new medium, while it can also offer a direct leg-up for current students and instructors.

Please let us know about your own wiki experiences. Have you edited or otherwise contributed to a wiki web site? Is your firm or school using a wiki now, and if so, how is that going?

Let us know what your thinking about wikis and architecture. Reach us either directly by email at editor@architectureweek.com, or in the public realm of our discussion forum online.

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