::By Daniel Marquez Lisboa
Before going into the “How To” in detail, just a few brief FAQs:
What is the Community Wiki?
Beyond the existing forums about GeneXus and its family of products, the Community is the automated space created by Artech, and made available to simplify communications between the company and its users. In fact, it is the main website for obtaining updated information on the GeneXus family of products. The Community Wiki is simply an application made with GeneXus X Evolution 1, which has already reached its third version.
What can we find in the Community Wiki?
It provides full information on GeneXus, commencing with its 9.0 version; and mainly, it offers information on GeneXus X and all the functionalities of its subsequent versions. But that’s not all: there are also documents explaining how to implement such functionalities, step by step. Artech’s team is permanently updating data on functionalities and creating data for the new ones. It’s all there!
Are all users allowed to participate and collaborate?
Sure. All they need to do is register with a username, a password and an email address, and they are ready to be part of it. Then, they should follow the stages of edition, imagination, and contributions to be shared with the Community.
Once in the How To, how can I write an article?
Though a wiki may be seen as a chaotic site for everyone to express their ideas and discuss in a disorderly manner, the main purpose of the Community Wiki is to “talk” about GeneXus and its tools. That way, to avoid such anarchy for readers, everyone should be clear about what is going to be published. A good title is also recommended, which is the second step in creating a document; the first and most important requirement is to log on with a username and password and it’s all yours.
All you need to do to create a new article is press the New Page link and then select the type of edition desired. And what does this mean? The main elements you will be able to create in the Community Wiki include:
Articles: documents where you can express your ideas. They represent the majority of items published in wikis.
Images: this is the option you will need to select to include an image within an article or to simply make it part of the Community Wiki. However, it is not the only way to achieve that, as you will see further ahead. Bear in mind that single images (.bmp. jpg, etc.) are not considerable contributions. The idea is to later embed them in an article.
Files: this is the way to incorporate a document with a foreign format, based on the same recommendations applicable to the Image type. You can load text documents (Word, Excel, etc.). Fortunately for you, they will all remain stored and protected in the database of the Community Wiki.
Categories: this is probably one of the most significant aspects of wikis. Categories allow the nesting of Articles inside them, which will depend on them too. That is to say, articles will be hung from the category tree. For instance: you could create the category “Specifications of User Controls” and then categorize the documents relevant to this category. Also, there may be categories within categories, though that will not mean their losing prevalence on their own. That is to say, a category may be within another category and still be a single category for another group of articles. In the case of the “Environment Preferences” category, it is a category in itself, while it is also categorized in the “Environments” category. The “Environment” category has tens of articles and other categories inside it, and also this is the case of the “Environment Preferences” category. There is no impediment for this.
Videos: just as it happens with images and files, you will be able to incorporate a video into the Community Wiki in a simple way. In this case, videos must be hosted in a site specific for this purpose, like YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video. The information is copied from the wiki to embed the video in a wiki page.
Editing
When creating or modifying an article or category, users will come upon a text box with which all IT professionals are familiar. This will allow freedom to write and format a document at the user’s own discretion by using the available toolbar (fonts, bold, italics, colors, etc.). That text box available is the FCKEditor data type that may be assigned to a control character in GeneXus (it must be borne in mind that the Community Wiki is an application created with GeneXus X).
In the editing stage, you can create links to both other documents in the Community Wiki, and to external elements on the Web. For example, if the idea is to set a link to another article of the type:
“You can obtain further information here”
and the term “here” is the link to the article desired, just click on the Wiki Link icon in the toolbar and then select the type (Article, Category, etc; let’s suppose it’s an article) of document you want referred, in the Type cell of the window that will open up. Then, start writing the name of the article in the Name cell (where you will see, as you write, the existing articles in the Community Wiki that have that pattern). Suppose you want to include “Environment Preferences”: select it, enter “here” in the Description cell and you’re ready to go! In the site where the cursor was positioned, the following string will be inserted:
[[Environment Preferences|here]]
In the event that “Environment Preferences” were a category, the link inserted would be:
[[category:Environment Preferences|here]]
If “here” were to be a link to the Web, then write the full text in the editor, then highlight the term “here” and press the “Insert/Edit Link” icon. Then enter the URL of the corresponding site. That’s all! GeneXus takes care of the rest.
But..., is that all?
In what concerns creating, yes, those are the main aspects. Needless to say, you have access to a group of links, on the site top, which will keep you informed about the last pages visited, the most recent ones, etc.
And you also have a very powerful Search that will allow any search needed. Consider the following link that will help you in finding contents of interest to you:
http://wiki.gxtechnical.com/commwiki/servlet/hwikibypageid?6733
In sum
To sum it up: have a go at it! Collaborate with the Community, clear your doubts, and find it all in the Community Wiki. This was just an overview on how to get started, which will be supplemented with further details in News to come, including the actions necessary for obtaining high-quality documents.