After signing in as a valid user, click on the Edit button to modify the text of the homepage. This page will always be the first page that users see when visiting your site, unless they come in from a URL pointing to a specific page in the wiki. You can change the name of the home page by following the instructions on the admin page.

The ProntoWiki Edit Page

Start by clearing the text window of the default text and type in new content. The exclamation points at the beginning of some of the lines denote header text.

In this example, I have entered some data about my new (hypothetical) orchid wiki. First, I want to put "anyone" in italics. To do so, I highlight the word with the mouse and click on the "italics" button. This can all be done by hand as well; to put something in italics, surround it with two single quotes on each side. See the instructions page in the default wiki for more details on text markup.

I want to make a link out of the word wiki, so that it links back to the ProntoWiki project on SourceForge, so others can get a copy too. This is made easier by the Quick Reference buttons to the left of the text edit window. I just highlight the word "wiki" and click on "Named Link" from the Quick Reference list. I then change the URL to point to the site I want the link to go to.

Here's an aside on links. If you type in a URL by itself, the system will automatically turn it into a link. If there is a word in the text that exists as a page in the wiki, it will automatically be turned into a link to that page within the site. Named links within the site can be created just like the above example; the path must be hard-coded. A link to a page in a wiki can also be made by surrounding a word in square brackets like [this]; if the page does not exist, clicking the link will prompt you to create it.

Back to the example, I now have some text and I want to see what it will look like before I save the page. I just click on Preview and get a glimpse:

I can save from here or keep editing. I'm going to keep editing, and add an image to the page. Note that it is not permitted when creating a new page to insert an image until the page has been saved at least once. In this case, I am changing an existing page in the system so the file attachments options appear at the bottom of the page.

By selecting a file and clicking Upload Files, the file now becomes available for use.

By clicking "insert" next to the image, an imbedded link is placed in the page text.

I can attach non-image files the same way. The system automatically differentiates between images and everything else, and will create a link to a file while imbedding an image in the page.

When done, I click Save and the page is available for viewing. (Note: you can restrict anonymous access to the wiki, see the admin page for more details.)

Formatting Details

The following are the basic formatting tags used in ProntoWiki:

• ''Italics''
• __Underscore__
• **Bold**
• =Center=
• !Heading1
• !!Heading2
• !!!Heading3
• ----Line
• +Bullet List
• #Number List
• {Named Link}
• [Wiki Link]
• <<custom>>

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