I have spent a bit of time over the last few weeks merging our minimal support documentation from the CSP Help Desk Site to the massive collection of support information that exists in our CSP Support Site. It has been a great exploration of old documentation and updating documentation. I have learned a lot about wiki formatting and after a week of working in wiki tables, I can create wiki tables without a second thought.

Our Google Apps pilot group is off to a great start with around 22 volunteers already signed up. There is a wiki page for the migration process to move from Microsoft Outlook to Google Apps that will hopefully aid pilot group members in testing the full functionality of their CSP Google Accounts.

I finally got everything working to the point I am comfortable launching the new Support Wiki. But, there are a few flakey things here and there that will need to be adjusted to make it truly user friendly. Now, I need to finalize the print css so that it is easy to print pages from the wiki.

I’m getting really close to having the redesign complete. All the parts are loading up correctly, now I just need to put the skin on it–make it look right.

MediaWIki is a great wiki engine. (It is the basis of Wikipedia, if that’s any indication of it’s worth.) But they don’t make it very easy to change the templates. Working with the code for mediawiki is basically like reading a book with the footnotes all printed right inline with the text. (Rather than just looking at a small superscript number which refers somewhere else.) So when you’re trying to figure out why some template code doesn’t work, you can’t just go look through the “footnotes” one at a time until you figure out which one is causing so much pain. Instead, you have to look through the whole “book” trying to figure out which “date” is wrong in any of the “references”. A good template system keeps almost all the code separate from the html, only placing a few small references to the code in the text. Not Mediawiki.

Want to know what the missing code was?
> <?php endif; ?>. Grrrrr.

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code, php, mediawiki, templates, dydimustk

I’m working on a design for our Support wiki.

A little history: At one point we used the wiki only for documenting internal process at the Help Desk. Over time it became apparent that our internal documentation would be useful for the whole university. (Why should we hoard the steps for forwarding your email to another account?) The problem is, I have permission to use the design currently on the wiki for internal use only. So, I’m working on making the wiki look more like the rest of CSP.

It’s not playing nice though–I’m combing through the PHP line by line to figure out why it doesn’t want to load the code the way it should. It could be as simple as a single missing ‘>’ or ‘}’. Once it loads up, I’ll just spend a little time adjusting the CSS to make everything pretty.