Question

Hi,

I'm new to Twiki, although I've been using Wikipedia and a couple of other Wikis for years.

I just started at a new company last month, and we use Twiki for internal documentation. The docs are pretty extensive, but nobody really sets any standards for style consistency. I thought I'd try to take it over. My first question is, are there any good pages out there that go over guidelines for best style practices? Not just formatting basics, but really useful advice about what design philosophy to keep in mind.

On to some specifics... the front page of the docs consists of several templates, which themselves contain more templates, and so on. The result is that the front page is incredibly long and basically links directly to nearly every page in the wiki. There is a brief table of contents on top, and then each link jumps to a lower, more extensive table of contents down below. Second question: Is this normal, or do people usually move the sub-contents to their own pages? I suspect the latter, which is why this is probably going to be my first major effort.

Third question. There are various sections that each have their own document space. Nothing is stored in the main space, so when you search for a topic, you get no results. You can check a box to "search all areas." Is there a way to modify the search so that the larger search always happens by default?

Thanks in advance for any help.

-- RussellGlasser - 30 Apr 2008

Environment

-- RussellGlasser - 30 Apr 2008

Answer

If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

On #3, see SearchAllWebsbyDefault.

-- SeanCMorgan - 01 May 2008

The TWikiDocsStyleGuide is about the documentation of TWiki itself. You might find that some stuff is useful for your own documentation.

TWiki.org does not have yet good documentation on best practices on organizing content. My TWikiPresentation2007x10x22 covers this topic a bit, but a lot more can be done.

My personal take is to keep the homepage simple. One way is to take the newspaper approach: List interesting stuff that changes frequently "above the fold" (such as a blog roll or RSS newsfeed), and a directory "below the fold". Use multiple facets of navigation: By org chart, by TWiki webs, by subject matter.

Get more ideas at TWikiNewsPortal, HomePageNavigation, RenderListPluginDev.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 May 2008