User-submitted tutorials / How-To's

[MusicallyInspired]

Thank you!

[gumby]

Oh wait, is it possible (if everyone agrees) that you could switch the colours for the single quote strings and double quote strings? Companion's single quote strings are brown and the double quotes are red. I don't mind the darker red and the orange as replacements, but it looks odd to me to have them reversed. Again, if everyone doesn't mind.

Works for me.

[gumby]

Hey Collector, thanks for fixing my ugly 'table-based' posts in 'The Parser' section of the Wiki.  They look waaaay better.

[Collector]

I have been looking into Wiki tables and found how to combine cells in a row on a single line, which makes the edit view much more readable. I also found that adding the attribute {| class="wikitable" makes decent looking table that will give consistency through out the Wiki and {| class="wikitable sortable" will create sortable tables.

[gumby]

I've been having problems with the pages that use the syntax highlighting.  I get errors like this:

Code: [Select]

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/collectr/public_html/SCI/Wiki/extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi/geshi/geshi.php on line 4362

I also got it with the test page you set up for the syntax highlighting as well.  It doesn't always happen, however - sometimes the page is displayed normally.  Navigating away from the page & re-entering it sometimes clears the problem.

I'm running with Firefox 3.6.13.

EDIT:  Navigating away & re-entering page seems to *always* fix the problem.

[Collector]

I have been having to redo some of them by just hitting the edit then save. Every change to the sci.php file that I have made causes the pages that use it to need to be resaved. I have also found a problem with it when using it more than around 10 times on a single page. It will give that error. Not sure of the line number, though. The geshi.php is a lot more complicated than the individual language files. I haven't looks through it that much, yet to see what I might be able to determine.

[gumby]

Fingolfin came in and calmed everybody down, saying he's not against it. But he did point out that there are some things in the parser documentation that are out of date in our version.

I briefly looked into the parser documentation differences.  On the surface it appears that it's mostly (if not all) just formatting differences - their's is much more readable.  When I get some more time I'll have to compare them side-by-side.

Anyone have a clue if there is a newer version of the specs somewhere that their info came from, or was it simply their own modifications of the document that puts ours out-of-date?

[MusicallyInspired]

Their own modifications.

[Collector]

Something that has bothering me about the tutorial are the links to the help file. It is good to have the extra info, but I don't like that referring to them makes your browser leave your place in the tutorial with out right clicking and choosing open in new window or tab. To solve this I enabled plain HTML to add a javascript popup window for these links. You can see how it works on the http://sierrahelp.com/SCI/Wiki/index.php?title=SCI_Studio_Tutorial_Chapter_9_-_Elements_of_a_Script page. Let me know if it works for you or if anyone has a suggestion about it. Because of the security risk to the Wiki and to SHP from enabling HTML, this is one privilege that I am restricting to administrator only. If anyone has need of a popup on one of your pages, let me know so I can add it for you. I am probably going to enable tool tips for quick definitions that won't require a full featured browser window. Any regular user should be able to add that themselves.

[MusicallyInspired]

Works for me. I kind of like it.

[gumby]

Yeah, I like it to.  It maintains better 'train-of-thought' for the visitor.

[Collector]

While trying to track down syntax highlighting extension's display bug, I added the formatting of the <div class="CodeBlockStyle"> tag to the syntax highlighting in the CSS file to simplify things. So that the "CodeBlockStyle" tag is not needed and should no longer be used. I have gone through the Wiki and removed all of the "CodeBlockStyle" tags. Any scripts should now be entered in with just:

Code: [Select]

<div class="CodeBlockHeader">Code:</div>
<syntaxhighlight lang="sci">Script here.</syntaxhighlight>
I don't think that the syntax highlighting display bug has been completely fixed yet, but it seems to not be occurring as often.

All of the tutorials have been added and I have also gone through and made all of the tables and various style elements uniform. I had a couple of pages locked that I was working on that are now unlocked. Some pages were moved to arrange them in a more logical way to avoid confusion. With 4 tutorials and the SCI specifications all having a chapter 1, chapter 2, etc. I wanted the page titles to specify what it belonged to. I fixed all of the links broken by this so that the redirects are no longer needed. All of the images have been made uniform and uploaded. I think that most of the typos have been corrected. The basic structure of the Wiki is done.

Besides adding any new material and updating the existing information, the main thing to do is to to start cross referencing everything and making sure that all relevant categories have been added to each page. Since sections within a page cannot be added automatically to a category's page, they will need to be added manually. This can be done by editing the category's page to add links to the named anchor with in that page. These links can be found in the table of contents at the top of the pages. An example can be seen on the Said() Strings category page at the top. It links to the Said_specs section of the SCI in action chapter of the SCI specs. We should cross reference as much of the SCI specs document through out the rest of the Wiki as is possible/relevant.

So start looking through the Wiki to find what should be cross referenced/linked and look for any inconsistencies or details that need to be addressed. If you are not sure about something or have a suggestion, start a discussion for that page on the Wiki or in the forum here.

[gumby]

That's great news about the highlighting bug.  It's been driving me nuts for weeks. 

I highly recommend to everyone to have a quick peek at the Wiki if you haven't recently.  It's has very consistent style throughout (especially noticeable between the tutorials).  It's impressive what you've put together Collector .

[Collector]

Thanks. The tutorials took a while to do. Each had a lot of cleanup that needed to be done. Brian's had very sloppy, invalid HTML, Troflip's was done in Word, the worst HTML editor ever made and the Point and Click had to have this forum's formatting removed. Then they had to be converted to Wiki formatting.

[Collector]

Added an extension to allow the embedding of Flash. Some tutorials might benefit from a flash treatment, such as creating Views or Pic resources. Or perhaps using SoundBox? Here is a demonstration.

http://sierrahelp.com/SCI/Wiki/index.php?title=Test_page

The extension can easily be removed if no one thinks that this can be of use.