Project "Iron Giant"
Posted 1249460225|%O ago by 
pieterh
Iron Giant is a project to create a series of template sites. A template site is a ready-to-use site aimed at a specific purpose. This will help new Wikidot site creators get up and running much faster.
Iron Giant is a joint effort by leading Wikidot experts that brings together the best knowledge and practices developed over several years. See also Iron Giant best practices.
The project has moved to http://irongiant.wikidot.com. Please join that site using the standard Iron Giant password.
I think an automatically generated glossary something like the example below, could be a good feature to add to the wiki template. Does anybody agree?
http://www.lgam.info/glossary
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
Definitely, go for it. The general process is add stuff, people will improve it, remove it, or ignore it.
A glossary is a nice idea.
I just thought of an alternative; tag the page with a single letter A thru Z. Then, the glossary page can show 26 ListPages. Mainly, one letter is easier to type than "glossary" but also it may provide a better structured result. :-)
Portfolio
Good suggestion Pieter. I''ll restructure my glossary so that it works with alphabetical tags and add it to the wiki template.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
The new page module in the wiki template places new pages in the category "wiki".
I'm not sure this is a good idea.
I usually create pages by creating a link in an existing page and clinking on the link. If other people do this as well, and I suspect they will, half the articles will end up in the "_default" category and the other half will be in the "wiki" category which could cause a number of problems.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
Ah, you're right! On the wiki template the normal pages should remain in the default category and all special pages in their own categories. Will do.
Portfolio
Do you want the glossary pages to be wiki pages, then, or in a separate category?
Portfolio
The problem with that is that:
a) The random page function relies on them being in the wiki category, so that it only shows wiki articles and not everything else
b) There are links everywhere to fix =P
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
They probably should be a separate category so they don't appear in the list of regular articles. I will put them in a "glossary" category and see how that works.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
I notice Wikipedia puts all articles in /wiki/ so this is actually consistent with the goal of emulating that.
Portfolio
Keep going, Eddy, you're almost there… :-)
Portfolio
….. I've changed this a lot, on second thoughts I should've probably mentioned it here beforehand to get other opinions and thoughts. A lot of Wayne Eddy's hard work I've changed completely.
But I think I've done the best thing for this:
Instead of 30 pages:
I've put all of that into a single page
http://wiki-template.wikidot.com/glossary
Each letter is accessed using an anchor, so that the A-Z menu still works
Because it's now on one page, it's easier to manage
I also changed the way the tags work a bit. Instead of writing the first letter of the page's title, it requires the underscore _ character as well. Why did I do this? Because that way we won't end up with huge single-letter tags appearing in the tag cloud on nav:side …. only the tags that are of any use will appear there (i.e. tags that relate to the page's content)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Looks good, the only draw back that I can see is that the page could get very big eventually.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
But if that's the case, collapsible lists could be added for each letter, or remove the %%content%% part from ListPages so that it only needs to process the titles (I'm guessing that doing that would leave less strain on the server, but don't know how the module works so it might not make any difference)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Looks great but I'm a little confused now: do we pull glossary entries from the general wiki category or from the default category? (The 'wiki' page being in the default category.)
Portfolio
I'm not sure, I just copied the ListPages module from the Glossary-A page. It's looking for pages within the wiki and _default categories I think.
Just left it as it was, as I wasn't sure why it was set up that way.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
I made the glossary read pages in both the "wiki" & "_default" categories because the whole issue of whether the create page module creates pages in the "wiki" category or the "_default" category is independent of the glossary question & I wanted it to work no matter what you decide.
I still think many people are going to create pages by putting empty links in an existing page & that will mean half the articles will end up in the "_default category" even though the create page module creates pages them in the "wiki" category.
On the off chance anyone wants to see the glossary working in the way I originally envisioned, I have done it that way here.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
I don't mind changing all the pages so the default category is for the wiki. You're probably right to say that people will create pages from links quite often.
Your original glossary works nicely. I like the navigation. I'll try a tabview on the wiki template tomorrow, see how that works. Having a single page is desirable because it means we can make a glossary package that is trivial to install.
Portfolio
Just tried that, and this is the result I came up with:
If you're able to modify the CSS to fix that problem pieter, here's the code to make it happen:
And the glossary page can be found here
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
I understand this as workaround to the fact that our wonderful ListPages module does not have the functionality to group by starting letters, yet. (A very old wish)
Community:
http://community.wikidot.com/glossary was built on category glossary:
Handbook:
With the multilingual handbook, categories are used for languages. Hence, glossary entries in a language had to stay within the same category as for any other page. http://handbook.wikidot.com/fr:start-glossary uses the tag _glossary which is automatically set at glossary entry creation thanks to http://handbook.wikidot.com/include:start-glossary.
The result is a multilingual glossary.
Back to your project: by keeping the same category, you could have glossaries per section…
Hmm, well this is meant to be a template, for new sites. Would the majority of users want more than one glossary?
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
For template sites the key is "as simple as possible to provide the required functionality" since users will always want to evolve their projects and the more structure we pre-build the harder that becomes.
One glossary is already enough IMO :-)
Portfolio
Back to home.
Wanted to create global-template.wikidot.com but saw doc-template.
It's not obvious that doc means multilingual…
True. I've renamed it to 'babel-template' which is more appropriate.
Portfolio
Agreed.
Doc template isn't working!
doc-template
documentation-template
docs-template
All not working — where is that template? =|
EDIT: darn, could've read the post right above this one and found the answer! =)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Something I'm working on now, inspired mainly by James Kanjo's site, is a social networking & personal website.
Have a look at the blog template, because I'm thinking that if people want a personal website and just a blog on it's own isn't enough… there should be a template ready for them to start using straight away =)
Two examples (let me know if there's more so I can add them)
Help to create the Personal Template!
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Nice idea. What I ended up putting on my personal sites as well was a list of current projects (and past ones cause I'm getting old.:-)
Portfolio
Good idea - will add that to the huge todo list =)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
OK — it's embarrassing, but I do not understand how I'm supposed to apply any of those Iron Giant templates.
In order to clone it, I would have to become admin of that specific template site (if I just join it, I'm a member, but can't clone; and e. g. blank-template doesn't even have a system:join page).
When I create a site, I'm not offered to choose one of the Iron Giant templates either.
It cannot be meant to be done by manually copying pages, right?
What am I missing?
@Erich, you're missing stuff we've not made yet.
Tomorrow or next day we'll make a module that lets you grab a site for your own purposes, i.e. clone it and become master admin. Then we'll make a collection (like themes.wikidot.com) where we can post, discuss, and rate the template sites. Then we'll announce this to all Wikidot users via the newsletter.
And then, probably, Wikidot.com will crash as thousands of people try these sites :-) I'd rather that before we open the doors, we at least clone them privately and try them out.
For now, ask the MA of any site (usually me) for a clone, and then we'll switch MAs. Slightly awkward but workable for now.
I'll re-create a system:join page on the blank template, that was perhaps over-aggressive pruning.
Portfolio
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this info…
I have updated the help menu in default-template to look like this:
If nobody objects to the change or can improve on it, I'll make the other templates reflect the above, either later tonight or tomorrow. I have got to cook dinner now, or I'll be in trouble…
Sue
Update
These are the templates which now have the new help menu as described above:
These template sites do not appear to be open to membership by password, so have NOT been changed:
These templates have a different menu structure to the other templates, so have NOT been changed:
The Iron Giant best practices page has been updated to specify the new help menu.
Sue
@Sue: nice!
I've fixed the membership by password on the four sites where it was wrongly configured, sorry for that.
Portfolio
I've created a private-template site now, cloning the default and thus getting your nice new help menu.
Portfolio
Thanks for setting the membership by password, Pieter. These two sites are now done:
I was unable to edit nav:top on these two, due to a permissions setting:
Sue
OK, I need to review the permissions on all these sites. I guess the nav: category should be an admin thing. Anyhow, I've promoted you to admin on the two remaining sites. Cheers!
Portfolio
Thank you Pieter. Opensource and forum templates have now been done. :)
Sue
@Sue, the thanks go to you!
Portfolio
Pieterh,
While we don't have the Iron Giant Cloner, please let wikidot users see the page-options-bottom to see at least the source. Example: http://default-template.wikidot.com/admin:themes is not source-viewable.
Thank you.
I've changed this in all templates except project-template (not admin) and babel-template (there is no menu and I am too lazy to type admin:manage in the URL).
Portfolio