continued

Getting Started

To provide a more full-fledged design studio wiki presence, we'll work just a little more deliberately, first creating an overall cornerstone or home page for the studio, and then gradually adding additional leaf or branch sub-pages to support more detailed information in specific areas of the studio course.

Eventually the top-level page will look something like this:

The formatting of that main studio page, including ready-made links to the subpages for more detailed parts of the studio web area, is set up automatically in the wiki, just by using the "Design Studio Info" template, as we'll see shortly.

By the way, the full set of example design studio pages used for this tutorial is available online here:

http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/1996_Spring-UO_Arch484-Matthews_Studio

Pick a Name...

Before we get down to the cool automatic template stuff for the studio home page, here's a quick diversion on naming — page naming, which is going to be the one really nerdy piece of this article.

Now, first of all, you can't really get it wrong. The wiki software is very permissive about page names, and what's more, the wiki also has powerful tools to rename ("move") a page, or to redirect a page from one name to another.

That said, following a naming convention can help to keep the wiki well organized across the efforts of many users, and can help it feel transparent and sensible for a variety of users.

In some places in the wiki, like category pages, pages are listed by name. So it tends to work well to use names that go from general to specific.

And over time, many similar things want to be clearly distinguished, so it makes sense to use names with enough detail so the page is naturally unique.

With those principles in mind, our naming convention for design studio course pages is:


(Year) (Term)-(School Initials or short name) (Course Code)-(Instructor Name) Studio


Following the convention, the example we're using has a cornerstone page with a wiki name of:


1996 Spring-UO Arch484-Matthews Studio


When you're ready to create your own studio pages, pause at this point and jot down what the name of the cornerstone page would be, following that convention. Hang onto that note for a moment.

If you haven't already, now would be a good time to register a free user account at Archiplanet. Using the free account allows you to streamline the editing process a bit, and also gives you a user page (blank until you put something in it) to work with later.

Create Your Page

The most common page types — building, firm, architect, product — at Archiplanet are supported in a streamlined, customized way by the "Add a Page" helper form.

The design studio page is a newer thing, however, so we'll stick closer to the core functions of the wiki system. To create a new page, you just go its URL and then put in the page text. Here's how, specifically:

First, go to this blank design studio template page in your web browser, then select all the text within the dotted box as shown below, and copy that text to the clipboard:

Next, focus on the location bar in your browser — where the current URL is shown — and delete the stuff on the right-hand end of the URL until it just reads:


http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/


That's the base URL of every regular content page in the wiki.

Now, pull out that note with the studio page name you figured out, and type it into the location bar, at the end of the base URL, so it looks like this:


http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/1996 Spring-UO Arch484-Matthews Studio


Note that I've punctuated and capitalized carefully, but I've left in the spaces. Unlike most web sites, the wiki deals with spaces in the URL automatically.

Now, when the typed-up URL looks right, hit Return on your keyboard to go to that URL.

Since the page doesn't exist yet — you're just creating it now for the first time — the wiki responds with this message:


There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page.


Go ahead and click on the linked text "edit this page", and you'll get a new wiki page with a big empty text editing field.

Now, click in that field, and paste the blank template text you've been holding in the computer clipboard.

Work down the template text lines, and to the right of each equal sign in the top eight lines, fill in the appropriate information for your studio course.

After copying and pasting in the template text, and filling in data for the first few lines of the template, the page should look about like this:

Now click on the "Save Page" button. The page will save and reload, presenting the regular wiki page, looking much like this (but showing the information for your own studio):

That's the basic page foundation, well-identified and ready to build up into a useful edifice.   >>>

Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...