I have a client who wants a Wiki for her site fast. She’s insane. I will be using RW5 for this (please dont’ tell me use a newer version) but I do have RW6 if I must. I just have her site built with RW5 already and I don’t want to kill myself by being sidetracked making a theme to match.
Anyway, we need a stack or plugin where I can build a Wiki for her. I am thinking of using Accordion (which I have) but I’m just wondering if there might be a better one out there. I just don’t have the time to dredge through the multiple sites to see what’s there and I figure you guys would have a good suggestion right off.
Thanks so much. You have no idea how I appreciate you guys and your help!
It sounds like you probably need a CMS of some sort. There are a few great options.
Will Woodgate does his theme help as a wiki style here:
He is using Pulse CMS.
I use Armadillo quite a bit and love it. And several folks like Easy or Total CMS (both Joe Workman).
These days there are several good CMS options for RW users.
I know Will used to use a “regular” wiki product previously, but I can’t remember what it is. If you email @willwood I’m sure he’d tell you what he used to use.
I don’t want a CMS. She is not allowed to touch any of the “egghead” stuff!
We want the wiki for articles / reference and I’ll be the one adding them in when she needs them added. Last time I let her edit/add stuff we used a forum format and she made such a mess of it I’m revamping the entire site now.
??? I think I’m not understanding. If you are adding the materials, and it’s easy for you to do, why use a Wiki? Why not just use a regular Stacks page (markdown, text, whatever your pref) and add materials when she needs you to add? Heck you can tell her it’s a “wiki” if you want! But if other folks (not just her, but other people too) are not contributing than the “wik” has gone out of the “wiki”. Just do whatever is simplest. And creating a formal wiki certainly ain’t the simplest solution, or the best solution, in this particular case.
I’m afraid I didn’t make myself clear enough and Matthew’s second reply is what I’m doing now. I’m literally copying hundreds of her “documents” and “articles” over from an old site to the new one. VERY TEDIOUS!
she also picked the worst time of the year to have it in a hurry!
I just converted 800 blog pages to stacks pages using a macro app. It’s tedious to setup but goes rather smooth and quick once it’s working well… Basically you open the new and old side by side and have the macro do all the copy and paste for you. I had a common layout everything was going into so that helped.
The problem is she doesn’t format anything. I literally am correcting and making her articles legible. I’m also adding in credit where she didn’t credit the original author. My head aches!
Since it’s macro software it’s only limited by your own creativity (in getting it to work). In looking at that top section I see the layout does not lend itself well to doing what I did. You would spend as much time learning your macro software and setting up as actually doing the job… Is the link you provided the new or old site? I hope it’s the old as the site at the link you gave is not a wiki. But as always… I could be wrong…
I’m not sure what the best approach is. I don’t think I’d use an Accordion approach: mainly because that seems to be too time intensive. But it’s definitely not an easy problem to fix. Here’s a couple more ideas:
use a FAQ stack. Yes, a bit like an Accordion but I think overall your work will be faster. Not tons faster, but a bit faster. And probably look better.
consider using markdown. Create one long page for each “item”. Then use the Jump stack by Will Woodgate that provides some very nice auto-navigation to specific items via a auto-table-of-contents creation. More here: https://stacks4stacks.com/jumpstack/
Using the second appraoch you’d only need to create 4 markdown files for your 4 sub-pages. That way when anything needed to be updated it could be on your computer (i.e. don’t need to open up RW right away). Downsides of the second approach include: you need to know/learn markdown (but that won’t take more than 60 min), and you might need RW6 or 7. Check if markdown stacks come with RW5 (I think not) and if Jump stack will work with RW5.
I feel sorry for your situation. I know my suggestions may not help you right now, but I’m trying to brainstorm alternative approaches. I’ve used the markdown + Jump stack on lots of long pages (I create course websites) and it works a charm.
The jumpstack is nice but i’m going to stick with what I’m doing I think. The main idea is to get them off that damn Facebook and back onto the site. She keeps posting those stupid articles on FB too and she’s making my life difficult doing that. Her members are literally too stupid to work the FAQ or the jumpstack thing. This at least is point/click for them.
Trust me when I tell you they are making a mess of just joining the site. They’re using AOL email addresses or others that the system flags as spam. So trying to reformat that crap and walk the morons through registration i’m about ready to scream. They seem to think I am on FB all day long and they are asking for tech help to me there. FFS I feel like Michael Corleone in The Godfather trying to get out.
I used Keyboard Maestro but any macro app “recorder” would have worked as it’s basically just copy and paste. It worked for me because I had a “template” page and all new pages were the same but with different content. Basically you make your blank template page with all common “global” info in it… Then you open your old project and open your new project side by side. (I have a 27" monitor which helps too. You then have the macro (from your recording and tweaking it) duplicate the template page in the new project, go to the old and copy file path, paste that into new, copy old page name, paste that into new, copy old content, paste that into new… etc… The key for me was that I was doing a fixed layout with a “title” (from blog to a stacks text blog), “Date” (from the Blog field to a stacks text block)… and etc. So it was literally just thinking thru the setup and then having Keyboard Maestro do all the work. I also use “SizeUp” which allows you to place and size windows in exact positions every time, though I believe all the Keyboard Maestro click positions were relative to the window and not the screen. I also had to put a 2 second delay on the “duplicate page” step…
I’m not saying this works for all… In fact… .this will only work when source pages are same layout and all new pages are same layout. I happened to be working with a blog so the data and fields were in a “fixed” position.
Getting the macro to work can be frustrating… but if you go slow… think it out… and make your macro step by step, macro’s can help a lot in “conversions” like this. Once the macro was working I did 800 blog pages to stacks pages in a couple of days (not full time) simply by hitting a pf key to run the macro. I could have looped to do a set of pages at once but I wanted to see the results of each page so I did one page at a time.
Oh YEA! I have been using keyboard maestro for years and yes, it’s an essential app (on top five along with Launchbar).
Thanks for letting me know the details. Recording the steps using KM is great. I did it once while working with lots of snippets in textexpander (wanted to change them all to plain text).
Stacks are extremely tedious to work with when using and arranging large amounts of data.
Have you looked at the Accordion plugin (not a stack) from Yourhead. http://www.yourhead.com/accordion
If you are doing what I think you are doing, it is a very easy way to add large amounts of content and manage it simply.
