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Contents

Introduction

Openbravo Wiki is an essential tool for online collaboration, allowing rapid growth and centralization of information created by Openbravo community. Mediawiki, a very powerful collaborative web application, is the tool used to manage Openbravo Wiki.

If you have any questions about editing documentation for the Openbravo project contact Openbravo at "patricia.sanjuan@openbravo.com" email account.

Wiki content

This wiki is focused on content about Openbravo, that is Openbravo Business Edition and Openbravo POS, that is Openbravo Commerce Edition. It's not for personal notes and the likes.

Set the correct date and time

To set the correct date for your current timezone, go to PreferencesDate and time and click the Fill in from Browser button to add the correct offset.

This is really useful if you look at the Page history or Recent Changes pages, so you will see the correct date and time.

Editing articles

In this section we explain how you can work on the content of already existing articles or articles that you just have created.

Openbravo User Guide edition

Openbravo User Guide is protected against manual editing because it is automatically generated from Openbravo meta-data.

If you want to change any user guide wiki article you can only make those changes in the "ManualDoc" sections.

You can use "View Source" option to take note of the "ManualDoc" you need to modify.

WikiHelp ViewSource.png

After that you just need to edit and update the corresponding wiki article on the url: wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/ManualDoc:XXXXXXX

Get registered and validate your email

Before start editing an article you have to be a registered Openbravo Wiki user. If you are not, you have to create an account. Once the account is created it is very important that you validate the e-mail associated to the account. You can do that from the user preferences and properly answering the automatic e-mail that Openbravo Wiki will require you to answer to complete the validation process.

The account created will only have read permissions, to have write permissions you have to write a mail to "staff (dot) rm at openbravo (dot) com" asking for them.

Editing the content

This is a quick list of basic MediaWiki style formatting commands.


Wiki formmating command Description
''italic'' italic
'''bold''' bold
==heading==
===level 2===
====level 3====
<pre>source code</pre> (or leave a blank space before)
source code
[[Link to another Wiki page |optional text]] Creates a link to another internal Wiki page
[http://www.externallink.com Description] External link to a resource
* Bullet list item * Indicates that is part of a bullet list
* first level item
** second level list item
*** and so on
  • first level item
    • second level item
      • and so on
# Numbered list item # Indicates that is part of a numbered list
# first level item
## second level list item
### and so on
  1. first level item
    1. second level item
      1. and so on
[[Image:File.jpg | Caption text]] Image with a caption text

There is an excellent description of how to Edit pages at MediaWiki web site. Also you have an excellent tutorial on how to create tables on MediaWiki home project page.

Edit with OpenOffice.org

If you don't like to edit inside the browser you can grab the content from the editing page, save in your computer as plain text (extension .txt) and then edit it with OpenOffice.org. When you have made your changes you can then export the document ( FileExportFile typeMediaWiki txt) and paste it again to the editing page.

Images

To upload a file use the Upload page. This is the page used for example to upload images for articles and referencing them in documents using the Image command. For example, if the image upload is called wizard.jpg you can reference it in your documents including the following tag

[[image:wizard.jpg | 900px | description of the image]]


Images are a very common resource in documents. We recommend the following guidelines when working with images:

Please refer to Media Wiki Image Help to discover more information about image syntax when editing the wiki.

Image formats

Email address format

Use words in square brackets [] for the dot "." and at "@" signs.

Example: for the following address: name.surname@openbravo.com use:

name [dot] surname [at] openbravo [dot] com

Font sizes and colors

Mediawiki provides the = symbol to create headers (as already seen in editing the content). Headers have different font sizes.

A font size can be also specified using html attributes:

<font style="font-size: 110%">110% text</font>

Note that we strongly discouraged to do so since it breaks formatting. Use this only in when you really need to.

The same policy applies to colors. To change the text color:

<font style="color: #51990F;"><font style="color: #51990F;">Openbravo green color</font></font>

Allowed colors

To allow a better readability of our wiki, we encourage every editor to strictly use only these colors:


Green #51990F Orange #F2A615
White #FFFFFF Black #000000

Avoid using HTML

MediaWiki systems use their own mark up language to format text. In the section Editing Content of this document you have a description of how to use this formatting markup. You can also use the MediaWiki quickbar at the top of the editing window, when creating your articles, to format the text.

Please avoid using HTML tagging, including tables, since it is not the standard way of coding styles in Mediawiki systems.

Highlight the code

If you need to add code snippets in your articles make sure you place the <source lang="XXX"> tag before the code and the </source> tag after the code (where XXX is either java, css, html, xml ...).

For example an xml snippet will display like:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="admin,manager"/>
</tomcat-users>

Templates usage

Templates are used to put the same kind of content in pages. Like the Language header or the rating poll.

These are the templates used at Openbravo's wiki:


You have more information on templates at Mediawiki web site.

Redirect an article

To have one page to redirect automatically to another one (fore example Install translation points to Translating Openbravo#Installing a new translation) type only this text:

#REDIRECT [[page to redirect to]]

You shouldn't use always a redirect. For minor articles you can safely remove the old article and update all the links that pointed to the old article to the new one. For main articles always keep the redirects.

Creating new articles

Make sure the article does not exist

Before creating a new article make sure that the article, or a similar article, does not already exist.

Before to start a new article, please consider if you can enhance an already existing article.

Choose a category and title

Articles are organized in categories (see their hierarchy). You can choose an existing category or think of a new one. e.g.[[Category:Development ERP]]. But think that it is easier for people to find articles when there are the minimum number of categories.

Titles

To have a consistent naming across our wiki we recommend some guidelines when choosing a new title for your article:

Create the article

To create a new page enter URL of the wiki link where you want it to appear in your browser.

In the top menu of the wiki use the "Create this page" action to create the new page at this location.

Use hierarchies for large articles

Openbravo's wiki has installed the Hierarchy extension which enables wiki contributors to create well defined hierarchy content for bigger documents (i.e. the user manual or the developer's guide).

To use this extension only 2 steps are required:

Create the hierarchy index

Create an empty article with the hierarchy index. It should look like:


<index>
[[Sample Top page]]
= Sample Chapter one =
== Sample Topic one ==
== Sample Topic two ==
= Sample Chapter two =
== Sample Topic three ==
=== Sample Subtopic A ===
=== Sample Subtopic B ===
== Sample Topic four ==
</index>

Where all lines in-between the equal signs are subpages (they can be indented like sections in an article) and there is a top page (in the example above the [[Sample Top page]]) which can be used for explaining the manual/guide, give some advices, show in which status is currently the manual, etc.

Add the hierarchy index to the articles

In each article it just has to be added the header an footer sections:

{{Hierarchy_header}} 
Article's content
{{Hierarchy_footer}}

So, just wrapping the content of the article with the header template and footer template is enough.

For a complete list of what can be achieved and what can not be done see the extension usage documentation.

Get informed when someone modifies the article

When editing a page of the wiki guide there is a checkbox just above the buttons that says Watch this page. If you select it you'll receive a message whenever someone writes to it or its discussion page.

It is suggested that you watch all the pages that you write or to which you make significant contributions so that you are aware of the changes made.

Document versioning

Sometimes you need to have different documents for different versions of a product. For example, we have different documents for the Openbravo ERP user manual. This our recommended policy.

For product related documents, such as manuals or release notes, we recommend to use different documents names reflecting the version on as part of the document path. For example:

And having a page index for all the related documents like the main page for Openbravo ERP 2.50.

We use the prefixes:

For the rest of the documents we recommend:

Preventing editing conflicts

Editing conflicts are irritating and time-consuming. Anyone that has worked in a Wiki system for some time has suffered them.

There is no basic rule to avoid editing conflicts, my suggestions for preventing them are:

Translating documentation

See Starting Guide for Wiki translators.

Consolidating and splitting articles

Consolidating documents

When creating a new document we suggest to keep all the content on a single page whenever is possible. We recommend this because:

Split articles

In the other side, for really long articles is difficult to keep track of changes. The best solution is to split the article in long parts. It can be done creating as necessary subarticles as needed with the following scheme:

If the main article is User Manual 2.2 each subarticle must be User Manual 2.2/Menu Functions or User Manual 2.2/System Admin.

That way it will be more easy to know how many subarticles an article has, to keep articles organized and to allow more than one page with the same name (i.e the same pages for different User Manual versions: User Manual 2.3/User Interface and User Manual 2.40/User Interface).

Single views

But the other way around it's useful sometimes.

For example, to print or export to other formats the User Manual you will have to go to each page and print/export them.

The best solution here is creating a single page view of an article and its subpages.

To achieve this, Wikimedia provides transclusion, which is resumed by "include the content of page(s) to create another one with their content but without duplication of text".

To include multiple pages in another page use this syntax:

{{User Manual/First page}}
{{User Manual/Second page}}
...


Examples in User Manual 2.2 Single Page View or User Manual 2.3 Single Page View.

Note that this is the syntax used for templates.

Style Guide

This is a list of recommendations for using the different formatting styles in documents.

Article titles: Use titles that reflect the content and preserve the spaces between words (i.e. Installation_Guide instead of InstallationGuide)

Titles: Capitalization and spaces between words, start with two equals headers and add more as you need subtitles (up to 6 equals)

Bold: Use only when necessary, i.e. formatting some text in bold is to remark it, but it loses this effect if an entire paragraph is bold.

Italic: Use for quoting texts or describing a UI navigation path (e.g. go to General Setup > Application > Background Process)

Tables: Use only allowed colors and keep in mind that a wiki is for content not for visual presentations. To add a border around it start the table with:

 {|border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0"

The cellpadding and cellspacing are optional, but try to keep them logical (i.e. don't make a table with cellspacing="500")

Lists: It's not mandatory to finish each line in a list with a period, but use the same rule in all the elements' list.

Formatting: It's not a good practice to use the

preformat style to create headers

use the equal signs (==) instead

Links: Do not use the text click here. See W3 recommendations.

Name guidelines: Use Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS (with space between Openbravo and ERP/POS).

Documentation style guide

If you are writing an article about documentation make sure that you read our Documentation Style Guide.

Functional specification style guide

If you are writing an article about functional specification make sure that you read our Functional Specification Style Guide.

Spaces and newlines

Please add a blank line before each header section (the lines that contains the equal signs and a few words inside them):

(...)Last line from the previous section.

=== Some title ===
First line from the next section(...)

For lists add a blank line before starting the list (keep in mind that between list elements it can't be any blank line), another one after the list and a space between the * or # and the text:

Some introductory text before the list:

* First element of the list
** more elements
* Last element

Text after the list

Also add a blank lines before and after images and between blocks of text.

For example this text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint
occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
File:Loremipsum.svg
==== Header Lorem Ipsum ====
* List
** Lorem
** Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint
occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Some other text

Should be modified like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint
occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
 
File:Loremipsum.svg

==== Header Lorem Ipsum ====
* List
** Lorem
** Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint
occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Some other text

Categories

The categories are designed to be useful to users navigating the content of this site not to Wiki administrators. For example, if you have a document with multiple pages only the index page of the document should be categorized. Following this policy, when the user looks at the category finds documents useful to them not just list of pages that belong to a category.

This the current list of Categories for Openbravo Wiki:

Comments:

If you need new need categories please contact the Wiki administrators.

Wiki Archive namespace

Openbravo Wiki has hundreds of articles. Many of these articles are legacy documents that belong to older versions of our projects: user manuals, design documents, old coordination documents, etc. A search in Openbravo Wiki returns as result many legacy documents that are no longer useful making more challenging for users to find the information that they are looking for.

To address this situation, there is a Openbravo Wiki archive namespace where all the articles that we consider legacy are moved. The idea is to keep in the main namespace only documentation that is valid for the current stable version and the version immediately previous.

Additionally, when a document is moved to the Archive namespace, the categories that are not version specific are removed. For example, in a document with the categories General and Openbravo ERP 2.50, the category General will be removed but the Openbravo ERP 2.50 will be kept.

More information

Retrieved from "http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help"

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