Add some links and new cards
Howto
Wagn avoids making users "mark up" text with weird characters (like {[*-]}...) whenever possible. This step and the next explore the two main exceptions: links and nesting.
Both links and inclusions are special because they are references to other cards (or webpages), which means we need to do two things at once: (1) identify another card, and (2) put it in context on this card. All web links do that — (1) point to another web page, and (2) label that page.
Unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, Wagn tries to stay as close as possible to best practices. The wiki world doesn't always have agreed-upon best practices, but there is certainly a best-known practice: the one used in Wikipedia. Ours is very similar. The basic link mark-up is described in detail the links card:
Let's have a go at it. Open up the links+Sandbox card below, and try creating the following links:
- a simple link to the first card in the Recent Changes list (linked to in the upper left corner of every page).
- a link that points to your personal card, but shows your nickname as the text. For example, sometimes we call Wagn's lead developer "Word".
- a simple link to one of your favorite websites
- a link to a current news item on an outside website, where the text you see is a short headline.
Now let's explore one of the great innovations of wiki: linking to a card that doesn't exist, and then creating it. Below is a list of three cards, none of which should exist. Unless someone else created them, you should see red links:
When you click on one, it will offer to let you create that card. Go ahead, try it. Be sure to add a little text in the content, and then come back here and reload this page. You will notice that the color of the link has changed. Click on it to see your newly created card. Now delete that card. To do that, click on the "Edit" tab, and then click on "Delete" in the lower right corner. Reload this page one more time. Red again, right?
Technically, the card hasn't been entirely deleted, it's just in the trash. If you click on that same link again, you'll see that the text you entered last time is still there in the Changes tab. The idea is to make it really hard to lose work! To keep things clean for the next user, go ahead and click on the red link to "create" it again, erase all the content and save it blank, and then delete it again. When you're finished, all the links above should be red. (We just included more than one link in case more than one person wanted to use this at the same time).
There's another way to create new cards. If you click on "New Card" on the menu at the top of the page, you will see a new card interface much like the ones you saw after clicking the red link, except without a name yet. You don't actually have to save the new card, but look at the menu next to "card type" (it's set to "Basic" by default). Try choosing, for example, "Image", "PlainText", or "Company" and you'll see the editor changes right away.
Tips
- To link to special addresses on wagn (pages with names that aren't normal card names), like Recent Changes or Sign Up, just start the address with a slash: Eg. [ [ /recent | Recent Changes ] ]
- Don't worry about plurals or cases; Wagn handles those for you. Notice how FEATURE, feature, and Features all take you to the same card.
- See editing cards for more documentation.
The Wagn Way
In Wagn, links aren't just part of content, they're also part of structure. Links are tightly tracked and can be queried.
So it's important to keep link quality high. If someone changes the name of a card, we need to make sure the links are still correct. So we offer the user the chance to change all the links at the time of the update, and that change itself is tracked.
Our mixture of link and inclusion markup with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) rich text editing is also pretty unusual. The idea is to hide as little as possible, and to give special emphasis to links and inclusions, on which we are able to build our structure.
On to the next step:
Back to Become a Wagneer