Introduction

This page introduces some key aspects and uses of the SOLO research wiki for new (admin) users. This page can be viewed even when not logged in, however some of the more detailed information linked to will require you to log in first.

XWiki User Guide

XWiki has their own user guide which explains many of the fundamentals of using Xwiki's, like creating and editing pages. However, not all may apply to our wiki. We suggest first reading the information below, and using the XWiki user guide to look up any additional info as you go (or when explicitly referred to here).

Log in

You log in details should have been provided by one of the existing wiki members, if you have not received any, please ask you colleagues (or labsupport@fsw.leidenuniv.nl).

You log in by clicking on the profile picture in the top right

Logging in (as an admin) will not only allow you to edit and create pages, it will also reveal an admin menu on the right that you otherwise will not see. As well as extra links when you are on the home page.

Main vs Sub Wiki

While for the most part you will not notice this in daily use, the research wiki is technically a sub-Wiki of a parent Main Wiki. You can reach the Main Wiki at: https://solo.cloud.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/

Or click on the "Main Wiki" link in the in admin menu.

The main wiki is not actively used for providing information, and still has all the default XWiki settings and looks.

The one thing the main wiki is required for, is user management, including: creating new users and changing user settings such as password and email.

Change Password

One of the first things to do after receiving your login details, is to change your password. To do this, go to the main wiki, and then

1. Go to your profile. 2. Go to preferences in the settings tab. 3. Change password.

Structure & Navigation

You can use the horizontal menu bar at the top (1) to navigate to different sections of this Wiki (e.g. Software or Hardware). If you are not sure where to start, you can also use the search box at the top right (2) of the screen.

Once you have opened a section, you will find a navigation tree on the left (3) with all the available pages on the left side of the screen. You can click on pages to navigate to them, the tree will remain visible for the entire section.

Sometimes pages have related topics (4), for instance multiple pages in the Software section are related to  doing online research. Underneath the navigation tree you will see a "Topics" panel, there links are provided to all the pages of relevant topics.

Pages & Sections

Everything in the wiki, including special functionality, menu's, administration etc actually consists of wiki-pages objects, which you can open and access, and which may have some code attached to them.

All wiki pages exist in a hierarchical manner, like a document / folder tree, such that each page can have child-pages. The first level of pages in the sub-wiki are called sections, which in turn can contain many levels of parent and child pages. In a simplified view:

• Home
  • Support
    • Contact
    • ..
  • Software
    • Eprime
    • Matlab
    • ..
  • Internal
    • Maintenance
    • MyMacros
      • Lightbox Wrapper
      • Figure Anchors
      • ...
    • Solo Manuals
    • ....
  • ...

It should be noted that many pages are not really relevant to us (or to the researchers). As such these are hidden from view for most of the time.

To get an idea of all the available pages you can check out the page index tree.

Admin Menu

The admin menu on the left side of the screen offers some quick links to useful pages.

• UI pages: these are used to change the interface of the wiki, e.g. the "Top Menu" page allows you to add extra sections to the top menu bar and/or add extra pages within the section drop downs.
• Management: these mainly have to do with documentation regarding stuff that still needs to be done on the wiki and/or who is responsible for which sections.
• Manuals: these contain links to specific manuals which can only be accessed by logged in admin users. These manuals are located in a section on the wiki called "Internal". This section in its entirety (including all child pages) are only accessible to used in admin users. See more on this here.
• Macros: in addition to the standard XWiki macro's (i.e. special pages with attached code that provides extra functionality to the wiki) we have some custom made macro's as well. These macro's are located (as child pages) in the MyMacros section, with a description of their functioning and how to use them in the MyMacros section page.
• Templates: templates are basically preconfigured wiki pages, that you can use to quickly make a new page in a certain style (e.g. with some standard headings, table of contents etc). There are many default templates, but we mainly use three custom SOLO templates. The source pages for these templates can be found here. How to use templates is further discussed in the Creating & Editing Pages.
• Misc Utils:  Stand for miscellaneous utilities, and contains an assortment of useful links.
• Internal: a direct link to the Internal Section and it's child-pages
• Sandbox: a place to practice and test with creating and editing pages, macros and templates.
• Main Wiki: a link to the Main Wiki, used primarily for user management.

Creating Pages

To create and pages you need to be logged in as a user. If you want to get some practice and/or test new functionality, it is strongly suggested to use the Sandbox Section.

You can freely create and remove child pages here without impacting the rest of the Wiki. The Sandbox is also (generally) not visible to non-logged in viewers.

However, if you are a creating a page with sensitive information, either create it in the Internal Section or create it as an Internal Page, see here for instructions.

Some general information for creating and editing pages can be found in the official XWiki docs. It is recommend to take a quick look there now.

Templates

Generally we use one of three custom templates when creating new pages:

• SOLO Overview Template: used mainly for the main (parent) pages of a Section. E.g. the Software Section page.
• SOLO Page Template: the main template used for general content, e.g. information on a specific piece of hardware, software, location or service.
• SOLO Internal Page: used for pages that need to be kept private (see here for more info).

Each one of these templates is preconfigured with various macros that provide extra functionality.

Note also that the templates are just suggestions for starting, feel free to remove (and add) whatever heading and macro's you like.

Editing Pages

As a quick note, pages can be edited in various views:

• WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get: basically an Word like interface, that shows you directly what the page will look like (excluding some Macro functionality). You can also access the underlying HTML code by clicking on the source button
  
• Wiki Syntax editor. Shows you the underlying code that Xwiki uses to create pages, this makes it a bit easier to debug issues with macro's and layouts, but is less convenient than WYSIWYG
• Objects editor: This is mainly used to attach custom code (e.g. javascript or Xwiki syntax) to a page, e.g. to turn a page into a macro or template that can be used elsewhere.

Saving

Do not forget to click the Save button regularly, the Save & View Button if you also want to see the effect of any Macro's and/or enable the "Autosave" if you plan to edit big pieces.

Macros

Macros provide ways to quickly add functionality and content to your page. For instance to quickly add a table of contents, a highlighted text box, charts or page trees. You can add them using the + button in the WYSIWYG editor. For the full list, click on "Other Macros"

Do note that some macro's which do not directly produce an visible output (like a macro that affects all images on a page) can be hard to see (and manipulate) once inserted. Therefor keep in mind that you can always switch over to the Wiki editor, which will show you the Wiki syntax for the Macro directly.

There are some custom Macro's that we have developed, the source files and descriptions for those can be found in the MyMacro section, but they can be added from the editor like any other Macro.

Some of these Macro's are also inserted by default when using one of the SOLO templates to create a new page.

Tags

Often, pages that are related to each other in content are in parent-child hierarchies. For instance, a user manual for SONA is a child-page of the main SONA page.

However sometimes pages are related in less direct ways. For instances, there are multiple software packages that are used for building psychological experiments, so called Stimulus Presentation Software (e.g. E-Prime, OpenSesame, Matlab and many more).

These can not all be nested in parent-child hierarchies, therefore, to indicating such broader topics, we can use Tags.

Creating Tags or removing them can be done at the bottom of each page (you do not need to be in editing mode), by pressing on the + sign. If you start typing a tag name, the Wiki will try to autocomplete to existing tags.

Clicking on a tag will take you to an overview of all pages with that tag.

Overviews of all tags and related pages of the currently viewed page can also be seen in the Topics panel on the left of the page.

Macro's can also be used to include links to tag related pages into the page itself, e.g. using the NavigationColums macro:

Images

Some tips specific for our wiki, macro's and templates

• Insert Images: You can simple copy and paste images into the WYSIWYG editor (you don't have to use the insert image button).
• Image Sizing:The SOLO templates attach the "Lightbox Wrapper" macro automatically. This means that you can insert images into you page without having to adjust the dimensions of the image. It will be automatically resized once the page is generated. Note: you may not see this effect until you have pressed "Save & View" and then refresh the page.

User Interface

For the most part, you will not need to change anything in the user interface / menu's as most are dynamically created, with one exception: the pages in the top menu bar:

These are not added automatically, so whenever you have created a new page that is a direct child of a section, e.g.:

• Home
  • Software
    • MyNewPage

You will need to add it to the top menu to have it show up in the drop down. To do so:

Go to the Admin Menu > UI Pages > "Top Menu"

Open the Top Menu page in the WYSIWYG edit mode

Add the name of the page you want to show up in the top menu, as a element in the list. E.g. you can add "MyNewPage" as an element under Software. Please try to observe alphabetical ordering.

Then add a link to the text by selecting the text and clicking on the link button (or right clicking and selecting add link)

In the Link settings menu, under "Page" start typing the (actual) name of the page, if you typed it correctly it should show up in the autocomplete suggestions underneath. Select it and click on OK.

Finally, click Save & View at the bottom of the page, and refresh, or go to the Home page.

Now your new link should show up in the top menu!

Internal Section and Pages

For the most part pages on the Wiki can be viewed by anyone (i.e. without the need to log in). This is because we want to make it as easy as possible for researchers to access the information.

However in some cases, we want information to be be kept hidden from people unless they are logged in (and have admin privileges). To do that we have two different methods.

Internal Section

There is a top level parent page (i.e. section), called Internal. This section and any child-pages created underneath it can only be accessed by admin users. In the information above you will have encountered different ways of reaching this section, and different types of pages that are present there. The information here, in general, is not directly linked to any of the other sections/topics. You can expand the section tree in the "This Section" panel to see all of the pages in this section.

Internal Pages

Alternatively, we can also have individual pages that are set as "Internal". This is especially useful when there is a certain topic, for instance the Eprime software in the Software section, for which there is some information that we would like to keep private (e.g. how to give out licenses to users). To do this, we can create a (child) page, using the SOLO Internal Page template

This will ensure that the newly created page can only be viewed by logged in admins, even if the page is not inside the Internal Section.

Note that, as a convention to easily identify internal pages, we give them a Title starting with a period, e.g.: ".MyInternalPage"

This also makes these pages appear at the top of the document tree, e.g.:

Adding Users

We currently have a 25 user license (of which 16 are used), and going beyond this number is quite costly, therefor please create new user accounts only sparingly, and use shared accounts when possible. For new users, please follow all the steps below.

Create new user

• Go to the Main Wiki
• Go to the Menu (top right corner) > Administer Wiki > Users & Rights > Users
• Use the "Create User" button at the bottom
• Fill in required details,
  • for USERNAME use the ULCN name.
  • for PASSWORD fill in a temporary password (preferably a randomly generated one)
• Click on "Create"

Change user type

By default, a new user does not have the correct user type to create pages with specific permission sets or use advanced object properties. 

If left unchanged, any pages created with the "Internal Page" template for instance, will remain visible even when not logged in.

To change this:

• Go to the User & Rights: Users Administration page of the Main Wiki.
• Use edit button next to the relevant user.
• In the User settings page, go to Preferences 
• In the User Type field, set the dropdown field to Advanced.
• Then use the Save button

Add user to Admin Group

By default, a new user does not have any permissions on the SOLO (sub) wiki. To change this we need to add them to the admin group.

• Go to the Users & Rights: Groups Administration page of the Main Wiki.
• Click on the edit button next to XwikiAdminGroup.
• In the "Users To Add" field select the new user, and then click on the "Add" button.

Final check and email

• Finally, check whether the account works correctly, by logging in with it on the SOLO research wiki, and creating a new page using the internal page template, in the Sandbox section. Log out to see if the page is properly hidden.
• Email the user to let them know they have an account, instruct them to change their password as soon as possible and include a link to this manual page.