Advanced Users

This is a placeholder page for the addition of questions and/or content for an advanced users' tutorial.

Adding RSS Feeds
You can put an RSS feed on a WikiEducator page.

An example is Jim Tittsler's User Page which gets the latest pictures from one of his Picasa albums and the last few posts to identi.ca (You'll have to click "edit" on this WikiEducator Editing box to see the syntax)

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/jtittsler/albumid/5079532947364731441?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=en_US|max=3

http://identi.ca/jimt/rss|max=5

Jim has also written some Python scripts that watch for changes in pages in certain categories, and make new wiki pages out of them... but haven't been making RSS feeds available. But the MediaWiki API does allow a lot of scripting flexibility if there is something you are looking for that is not currently an RSS feed.

OER Handbook for Educators
The OER Handbook for Educators (written and published entirely on WikiEducator) has useful info to:

http://www.wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator/Use/Syndicate_materials_through_RSS/Atom_feeds

There are libraries for a number of scripting languages, Python just happens to be Jim's favorite (and there are two different libraries for it). I recommend the mwclient library.

http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/mwclient/index.php?title=Main_Page

Jim uses it to update pages on a scheduled basis like: http://WikiEducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/WikiEducator_Certifications http://WikiEducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/CommunityMediaStats http://WikiEducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/Otago_Polytechnic_Stats

Jim can share the scripts with you if any would be useful starting places.

Another Way
Rather than pulling content from one page into another, you could put the content that you want to appear on both pages into a MediaWiki template... and then use the template on multiple pages. That is a technique that is widespread on WikiEducator.

Contacting Jim
Jim can frequently catch me on the #wikieducator channel of irc.freenode.net (which you can get to with a web client from the Web Chat link of the Community section of the WikiEducator sidebar) if you want to talk in more real time.

Templates

 * Redesigning templates for printing to PDF feature
 * More complex templates (e.g. infoboxes, pedagogical templates)

WikiEducator namespaces
By default, a wiki using the MediaWiki software has 18 namespaces, including: In addition to these 18 namespaces, WikiEducator has created its own namespaces.Properties and Usage 18 default namespaces + additional WikiEducator namespaces.
 * the main namespace, where page names have no prefix
 * 15 additional namespaces, each with its own prefix. (Two namespaces, the so-called 'project' namespaces, get their names from the name of the wiki project, and so differ in name from one wiki to the next; on the Wikipedia, they are called Wikipedia: and Wikipedia talk:. On each wiki, these project namespaces (whatever they may happen to be for that wiki), can be referred to by the pseudonyms "Project:" and "Project Talk:", respectively.)
 * two pseudo-namespaces


 * You can see a list of pages sorted by namespace in Contents Help Page.

Transclusion and Substitution

 * Understanding and using transclusion
 * Understanding and using Substitution

Special Characters and LaTeX for WE

 * Introduction to
 * Usage of tags
 * Usage of $$$$ tags
 * See page: Help:LaTeX_Symbol_Tables
 * See page: Help:Displaying_Special_Characters

WE extensions
,, , , , , , , , , , , , and tags
 * Introduction to WE extensions
 * Usage of
 * See page: Special:Version

Additional codes available in WE

 * HTML
 * XHTML
 * XML
 * CSS
 * Using additional personalized CSS (monobook.css)
 * Java