DokuWiki 02 - Creating Links and Pages

Hello, this is Andreas Gohr from DokuWiki and today we wanna learn how to create links in DokuWiki pages. So here we are where we left off in the last DokuWiki screencast: our very first page, still as it was as we left. So let's edit that page again to add a few links. We press edit... ...and are presented with the DokuWiki syntax again in the "edit mode". To add a few links, let's add a few sections first: some internal links... Let's say we want to add some hobbies of mine, so we call that section "Hobbies". And while we're at it, we'll add some friends as well... so here goes the "Friends". To make that look nice we also add a list for that: let's add an unordered list item and let's create our very first link. So what are my hobbies? My first hobby is of course "programming". So we put "Programming" in here, mark it and press the "link button". As you can see, links are marked up in DokuWiki with square brackets - two in front, two after the text. You don't need to press the button in the formatting toolbar you can also just enter the same syntax. What (other) hobbies do I have? How about "Photography"? I love to take pictures. "Eating" - everybody needs to eat ;-) So let's leave it there and press "Preview" That's how DokuWiki will render our links. Let's just save them. What we created are three links to pages in our DokuWiki, pages that don't exist yet, because we haven't created them yet - we only created links. They are all marked red with a underline. So if you press one of them, it will tell you "This topic does not exist yet". You may remember that text from our first screencast. It is always shown when you follow a link to a page that doesn't exists. Here on the top you can see how the page is named it says "programming". Let's create that page real quick... Nothing new here, you know the rules: Just add some headline "Programming" "I like to program in PHP and JavaScript" There are probably a few languages more but it's enough to prove the point. We save that. You see, DokuWiki has that handy feature - it will remember which pages you visited. We started at the "start" page and then went to the "programming" page To go back to the "start" page we just press "start" again. You will notice, now the link is green, because that page already exists - we created it. That's how you create new pages in DokuWiki: You add a link at some page, then save, follow that link and create the new page. This makes sure that all your new pages will be linked with other pages so nobody can get lost in your wiki. How about external links? External links are equally easy to add. Let's add some websites here. Friends - Let's add Michael Klier who does a few very cool DokuWiki templates To add an external link, you can use the external link button and it will give you an example how to markup external links. It's pretty easy: just enter the URL - again in square brackets - and you can enter a description after a pipe symbol so the description would be - (sorry, the URL wasn't complete...) There you go - press preview and you can see that's how an external link will look like in DokuWiki it has by default a little earth icon to show it's an external link and if you follow that link it will bring you to an external page Let's save that one. I just showed you how to create links that have an optional title that is different from the page. I just showed it with an external link but, let's edit the whole page again and add some title to an other page. We have here "Eating" and let's say we add an other title calling it "Eating really good food" Save that. When we follow that link... - you see it already shows it in a tooltip - when we follow that link we will go to a page called "eating" because that is what we had before the pipe symbol in our link. Let's have a look again at the syntax: See? We have "eating" - that's the page name before the pipe, then we have "Eating really good food" after the pipe that's the title. Press cancel, follow the link, create it... What we have in as the title in the link has nothing to do with what we have as the first headline in that page, so we can even call it "Eating good food with friends" Let's go back to the start page You see, it didn't change anything in the link title. So these are different concepts. If you are familiar with creating HTML, you will probably feel right at home, everybody else shouldn't really have a problem with following those simple concepts. That's how you create links and that's how you create new pages in your wiki. To recap it: You use square brackets to mark up your links, use an optional pipe symbol to add an optional title and... yeah go crazy ;-)