Amigabill Projects

Sourceforge's projcet wiki is clunky

I was very happy recently to learn that you can set up a wiki for your sourceforge project. It's a "hosted app",
that they have installed and it's easy to get running on your project. But I find it hard to use.

Rather than the nice WYSYWIG style editors on WikiSpaces and other such places, it's more like twiki coding. Ugh. The link syntax is different if you're making a normal page link to another normal page than it is if you're adding a normal page to the side navication bar. Heck, just figuring out HOW to edit the side navigation bar at all took half an hour with the google, and then getting the syntax right was another half hour or so to get my first navigation bar link to go to a page in my project's wiki. Ah, crud, it shouldn't be that hard. Some documentation talked about editing php files from a shell login. Eh, I really don't want to deal with that kind of crap, Wikis are supposed to make this easy. WikiSpaces for example has an "edit navigation" link at the bottom of the nav bar. Click on it, edit, save. Easy as pie.

I nearly made my project webpage point to a WikiSpaces wiki, but then it's somewhat separated, and I wanted it kept tighter together with the project. So learning SourceForge's clunky editor it is.

Sourceforge's provided wiki system is MediaWiki. To edit the side navigation bar, in the current incarnation of things, search for mediawiki:sidebar in the search field of your project's own wiki page. This returns a meta-page that you can create and edit. At first it contains the code for what you see at he left by default.
 Start with two asterisks, leave off the square brackets you would use on a normal wiki page to link to another page, the rest of the target| linkname (target_to_link_toPIPE space link_name_to_show) syntax is mostly the same as the docs show for your usual page editing needs.

posted by Bill Toner @ 9:16 PM