Editing Pages
To avoid loads of clicking about, this information is all on one page for the moment. It will probably be split into 4 or 5 pages eventually as it gets bigger.
Page 1: Signing Up and Logging In
In order to edit the content on this web site, you need to be logged in.
The user accounts on this web site are tied to the accounts on the Communications Hub. See below for more information about the Communications Hub.
To sign up to this web site, click the 'Sign up' link at the top of the home page. Make sure you click on the SIGN UP WITH UK HUB button first and ignore the name, email and password fields on the Sign Up page. You will need your Hub user name and password, unless you are already logged in to the Hub.
Logging in subsequently is done also with your Hub user name and password. Click on LOGIN WITH XR UK HUB on the Log In page.
New users have the ability to edit any page, so please be careful.
Note that this web site is visible to the general public, so don't add anything that should not be visible.
Page 2: Editing Pages
This web site runs on a software package called BookStack. Their home page is at https://www.bookstackapp.com/. We have our own copy of BookStack running on one of our servers in Switzerland.
The user documentation is at https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/. We won't duplicate that here, but we will add things which are specific to this site or need extra clarification.
BookStack supports two different page editors called WYSIWYG and Markdown. We have chosen to use the Markdown editor for this site. Note that the BookStack demo referenced on their home page, while good for gaining an understanding of BookStack, is configured to use the WYSIWYG editor. This is a site-wide setting and can't be adjusted per user, because the pages are stored in a different format by the two editors.
You can edit the pages on this web site, for example to fix a typo, correct a link or add extra information.
To do this:
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You need to sign up and log in
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Then go to the page you want to edit.
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Click the Edit button
On wide screens a sidebar will appear on the left hand side which includes an Edit link.
On narrow screens, you have to click the Info tab at the top of the page to make the sidebar appear.
The editor accepts both Markdown and HTML. You may find that the page that you are editing is in Markdown or HTML or a mixture of both. For example in Markdown a bold word is indicated like this: **bold words** (rendered as 'bold words'). In HTML, you get the same effect with <b>bold words</b> (rendered as 'bold words').
For information about Markdown see: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics and https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax. You may wish to get yourself a summary of the Markdown codes by searching on the Internet for 'Markdown cheat sheet' -- there are lots.
For plain text content, no special markup is needed. Put a blank line between paragraphs.
It is a good idea to keep a copy of your text yourself locally in case it gets lost, through computer failure or user action. This can done by clicking in the editing area and doing Ctrl-A (Select All), Ctrl-C (Copy), then open Notepad, Ctrl-V (Paste), Ctrl-S (Save) and choose a place and name for it. These are the instructions for Windows. It will be similar for other operating systems.
When you have made your changes, make them visible by clicking Save Page in the top right hand corner.
Page 2B: Markdown Hints
This page contains tips for formatting your pages. Feel free to add things which you have found useful but were not obvious from the Markdown and BookStack documentation (see Editing Pages (above) for the links to those).
Tables
In addition to classic Markdown, BookStack supports the Markdown Extra extensions, see https://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/. This provides a number of extra facilities in addition to the original Markdown, in particular support for tables. Here is a quick example of how to insert a table.
| Item | Value |
| --------- | -----:|
| Computer | $1600 |
| Phone | $12 |
| Pipe | $1 |
This renders as:
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Computer | $1600 |
| Phone | $12 |
| Pipe | $1 |
Link on an Image
To put a link on an image, so that you can click on the image to go to another page, just use some image markup instead of plain text as the link text in square brackets [](my-destination-page.htm)
For example, this [](/books/engaging-our-rebels/page/rebel-ringing) renders as:
Floating images to right or left
The Markup Extra specification says that you should be able to add class attributes to image markup, but it doesn't work in BookStack. You need to put the image in as HTML as below if you want to float an image with the text wrapping round it. You can also use align-left and align-center.
<img src="/uploads/images/gallery/2020-08/thumbs-150-150/RebelRingers.png" alt="Rebel Ringers video" class="align-right">
Horizontal Rules in Dark Mode
Horizontal rules like this:
don't show up in BookStack Dark Mode. There is a link to turn Dark Mode on and off near the top of the sidebar or Info panel on the home page. This is a mistake in the BookStack default style sheet in Dark Mode where the horizontal rule is dark grey (#222) on a dark grey background. We mention it in case it puzzles you. We may or may not fix it.
Comments
You can add comments to be seen by subsequent editors of the page, but which will not appear on the final rendered page after the Markdown processing. There is no explicit mechanism for comments in Markdown, but we can make use of the reference-style link syntax like this:
[Comment]: # (you can put any message for editors here.
It can span more than one line)
Page 3: Creating New Pages
You can create a new page by going to the Book or Chapter where you want the new page, and clicking New Page in the sidebar. You can change the order of pages by clicking Sort later, which lets you set the exact order you want.
Split your text into multiple pages if necessary. If pages are too short, it is hard to find things using find-in-page in your browser, as you have to do it separately for every page. If the pages are too long, they become hard to take in. Also on a long page, you may have so many headings that the Page Navigation on the left (wide screens only -- on a narrow screen it is on the Info tab) becomes taller than the height of a typical screen.
Headings
Another way to stop the Page Navigation getting too long is to make headings at the lowest level which don't appear in the Page Navigation by just using a short bold paragraph, like the one above, which looks like a heading but just uses bold markup **Headings**.
Tags
Shelves and Books
If you think we should have another Shelf or another Book, please discuss it on the appropriate Mattermost channel or forum first so that we keep some kind of coherence. (Each Shelf needs to have a note of where discussions should be held). For the moment, use the channel and forum described on the Contact Us page.
Only users with the higher level of permissions (Editors) can create new Shelves. Anyone can now create new books, but feel free to ask for advice about the most suitable name and location first.
Page 4: About This Web Site
At present, this site is intended for the United Kingdom only.