Navigation (Wiki Help)
From RemObjects Software
This is a Wiki Help Topic
Provides help on using the RemObjects Wiki itself
The success of a documentation resource such as this wiki depends on how easy it and comfortable it is to navigate and access pages. Accordingly, RemObjects Software has invested and continues to invest time to constantly improve this wiki. However, nothing is perfect and if you can think of ways to improve it, please write and tell us].
As people have different needs and different manners of working, we have provided several complementary systems, so you can use whichever suits you best for the task in hand.
Navigation using the Sidebar
navigation section
- Main Page: a useful starting point for navigation. In particular, use the links on the right of the page. The 'Hot Pages' provide details of the most important recent changes.
- Recent changes: this can be useful but a bit overwhelming if you don't visit on a daily basis. Tip: visit 'my preferences' and the 'Recent Changes' tab - setting the Enhanced option will group changes made to each page.
- Random page: self-explanatory
products section
- A list of our most important products.
special section
- Glossaries: list of available glossaries
- Lists: provides quick access to classes, interfaces, etc. It displays two lists, sorted by product and item type respectively.
- Categories: displays lists of the most useful categories and templates. Clicking on an item will display a list all pages that reference the item.
- Help: the main help page
search section
Enter a text string to find relevant page(s). The list returned is in two sections:
- matching pages
- pages that contain the search text
toolbox section
- What links here
- Related changes
- Upload file
- Special pages: for more advanced navigation, described later on this page
Access via Product
This wiki describes all RemObjects Software products and needs to cater for all customers from those with a single product up to those with all projects.
The wiki infrastructure has been designed so that the user of a single product can navigate 'his' product without getting confused by pages relating to other products.
Each product has its own 'home' page which provides a useful start point. These pages present a range of 'top level' indexes such as 'Architecture', 'Features' etc.
Topic pages typically belong to a product and a top level index and the 'link' displayed in the page header is actually two links next to each other - to the product home page and the top level index.
A list of all pages associated with a particular product is available via the category link shown at the bottom of the page.
Using the Glossaries
Individual glossaries are provided for each product plus two special glossaries:
- Technical: refers to pages relating to non-RemObjects products and terms together with pages that cover multiple RemObjects products.
- Wiki Help: has links to pages that describe the use of this wiki.
All moderated pages (i.e. those that have been reviewed and approved by a sysop) should have a link in at least one glossary. Often glossaries will contain alternative links to a single page and the glossary links may be a shorter version of the actual page name. For example, in the RemObjects SDK glossary, RemObjects SDK Features displays as 'Features'.
Navigation between pages and their associated glossary is two way, as is navigating between the different glossaries
Category Access
Each moderated page will show at least one category at the bottom of the page. The first category listed will be one of the following: index, text, stub or help, as described in Wiki Structure#Categories.
Other categories relate to particular concepts and some of the most useful include (the links below list the pages referenced):
- .NET only (i.e. not applicable to Delphi)
- Delphi only (i.e. not applicable to .NET)
- Channel
- Class
- Interface
See sidebar (special/Categories and toolbox/Special pages) for other ways of accessing category information.
Template Access
Much use is made of templates in this wiki so as to maintain a consistent look and feel. In addition though, templates can be a useful addition to your navigation armoury.
First, you can tell if a page contain(s) templates by going into edit mode - you will see the templates listed at the bottom of the frame around the page data.
A nice trick is that you can then click on a template link to display it followed by selecting 'What links here' from the sidebar toolbox. This will present you with a list of all pages using that template.
See sidebar (special/Categories and toolbox/Special pages) for other wayss of accessing template information.
Use of the Special Pages
The MediaWiki engine provides a huge list of 'special' pages (via the sidebar toolbox), some of which are very useful for navigation. Browsing through the options available and seeing the output provided can be a useful exercise.
