Guidelines

Here’s where the authors of this site can state (and discuss) guidelines for the content of this site. It should document matters of organization/structure, style and usage (and anything else relevant which comes up).

Action Tabs

  1. Edit Table. This, unsurprisingly, is for editing info in the tables. It’s ‘cleaner’ than using the raw ‘Edit’ command, since you don’t have to content with all the extra code/markup. (This feature adds some of the relevant markup for you, and helps keep the site consistent.)
  2. Update Top Resources. This creates the summary page for each topic. E.g. if you add some new Genesis commentaries on the “Browse all Genesis commentaries” page, you can automatically update the main “Genesis” page by clicking ‘Update Top Resources’. It selects the best few items from each category, and presents them on the main page. It currently has an upper limit of 5, to prevent things getting too cluttered.
  3. History. This lets you ‘undo’ edits by reverting to previous versions of the page.
  4. Edit. This gives you full access to exactly what’s in the page content, markup and all. On most pages, there’s no immediate tab for it (to encourage us to use ‘Edit Table’ most of the time. You can force yourself there by replacing ‘?action=edittable’ with ‘?action=edit’ in the URL bar.) Try to keep use of this feature to a minimum - and try to be confident you understand what you’re doing if you do use it. (Don’t forget the History tab!)

Nice Features

  • External Links. Site-wide policy is to have external links open in a new window. You can achieve this by prefixing the link with:

%newwin%

  • Technical Terms. It is good practice to provide a explanatory link for technical terms. This can most easily be done using Google’s ‘define: [term]’ function. See the entry on Longman’s commentary for an example. (An easy way to create this is to do the search on Google by hand, and then copy the resulting URL.)

Generic

  1. Obviously, be particularly careful with spelling, grammar and usage (or use a spell checker before posting).