Hints and Tips for Using the Site

You can set up the site to meet your needs. The home page tries to provide links to information you need for your organization. The footer may best show the hierarchy or tree of the site.

It now incorporates current information for the Otsego-Schoharie District at
www.OSDMasons.org/OSMD - the blogspot still exists, but it it out of date. Older articles will be moved from blogspot as time permits.

Domains:

• www.OSDMasons.org is the Masonic Charities Corp. It supports Masonic organizations in the area.
• www.leatherstockingmasons.org is for the Central Leatherstocking Masonic District.
• Oneonta466.org is for Oneonta Lodge No. 466
• www.Oneonta466.org is a brief page listing links

The domains use the same computer and database. They require separate logins, but edit all the same stuff. The perspective plugin can be used to display different text for each domain.

For example
{PERSPECTIVE(perspectives=1)} {img type="fileId" fileId="13" max="36" alt="leatherstockingMasons.org" responsive="y" imalign="left" link="http://leatherstockingMasons.org"} ~hs~ ~hs~ ~hs~ ~hs~ ~hs~ {FONT(family="Century Gothic" size="32")}~~#FF6:Central Leatherstocking Masonic District~~{FONT} {ELSE}{img type="fileId" fileId="13" max="36" alt="osdMasons.org" responsive="y" imalign="left" link="http://osdMasons.org"} ~hs~ ~hs~ ~hs~ ~hs~ ~hs~ {FONT(family="Century Gothic" size="32")}~~#FF6:Otsego-Schoharie & Delaware Masonic Charities~~{FONT} {PERSPECTIVE}

where {ELSE} separates the two for the top heading .

O-S District E-mail Group

To Send Messages and Event Information to the group you must be a member of the group. Then just send an e-mail to o-sfreemasons at googlegroups.com

To join the O-S Freemasons E-mail group have your lodge secretary send a request to oneontamasonry at gmail.com

Contributing

This site is designed for you to contribute information about past and future events. The primary vehicle for this is to submit an Article and upload photos and files to the galleries. If you want to do so, please ask for an account and assistance if you need that.

OSDMasons.org Account

This website requires a different account from the Google e-mail group. An account here will allow you to upload files and pictures, submit articles, and manage your organizations webpages here. Every lodge, chapter, etc should have a webmaster to do this,

Site Structure

This website uses tiki features to build a set of pages for each Masonic Group using
Structures, Theme Control, and Categories

Each group has a Group Header page that is included using the custom group module depending on the category group's theme assignment.

Menus

Wiki plugins

Calendar/Events

The O-S Freemasons Calendar is the same except that Oneonta Lodge events have been moved to the oneonta466 at gmail.com calendar. Both appear at
http://osdmasons.org/tiki-index_raw.php?page=O-S%20Agenda

Thus far "area" calendars include
O-S Freemasons
Oneonta466
OneontaMasonry
8thCapitular
EliasLightDeMolay
OneontaDAR
and are shown together at
http://osdmasons.org/tiki-index_raw.php?page=Agenda

You may deselect from view any of the calendars. Use the triangle next to "Agenda".

You may include any of these calendars on your Google calendar. Google has help for that.

Each lodge/organization can (should) have their own gmail account/calendar that they can manage and have included here.

Viewing

• For wiki pages display the print view.
• Using Wiki pages
• See docs.tikiwiki.org
• Using Wiki Pages at Tiki Docs

Additional information will be shown for Validated users.

Using the Wiki

The Wiki is an environment where users can edit pages as they want adding information, links, lists and images that they find useful, you can use a Wiki as a feature of a users community, a club, a fan site, etc. The most important elements in the Wiki are the Wiki pages. The Wiki is the most important feature in intranets or collaboration webs.

Creating and Editing Pages

If you have the appropiate permissions you will see a menu at the bottom of pages with several options and one of them will be “edit”, when you click “edit” you are able to edit the page that you are watching, you can try editing a page and writing some text on it. Use the “preview” feature as many times as you need it before clicking “save”.

If create new pages, prefix names with your organization number then use alias to better describe to browsers.

In order to create a new Wiki you should first generate a “reference” to the page from an existing page, Wiki automatically generates a reference when you write a word using Capitalized words smashed together, for example ThisIsMyPage or TennisResults or VisitLondon, when Tiki first sees a reference the page will display the name followed by a “?”, let’s see an example.

We’ll edit the home page.

Access the home page and click “edit” at the bottom of the page.

The number of options and boxes when editing a page depends on the features enabled when configuring the Wiki.

Write some text making sure you use the word MyFirstPage, save the page using “save”. Use the preview button if you want to preview how the page will look like once edited.

As you can see there’s a “?” question mark following MyFirstPage, this indicates that MyFirstPage is referenced from this page but has no content (it was never edited) so the “?” question mark is a link to “edit” the page. Click the question mark and edit the page.

Save the page using the save button and you will see:

Click the “home” option in the menu to return to the HomePage.

As you can see MyFirstPage is now displayed as a link, if you click on it you will access MyFirstPage viewing the content you just edited.

This is how new pages are created and edited and how the Wiki is navigated, as you can see creating pages is really easy and that’s why Wiki’s are populated at a very high speed rate by their users adding pages and content as they need.

If you want to know what kind of features you can use when you edit a page visit the Wiki Tag System section where you will learn how to use titles, lists, images etc.

Viewing a Page

When browsing a wiki page a lot of information is displayed, the number of icons buttons and information depend on the options enabled for the Wiki. In this section we’ll explain all the buttons and icons that can be used when browsing a Wiki page.

Understanding what each button does:

• Print: view a printer-friendly version of the page. If you want to print more than one page use the print feature in the wiki section of the application menu. This option will display a printer-friendly version of the page removing menus, sidebars, banners and all that kind of things.
• Edit: edit the page. The Edit button takes you to the edit screen where you can edit Wiki Pages, since editing Wiki pages is the most important feature of the Wiki section we have a special dedicated section in this manual and you can find it after the rest of the page-bar options are explained.
• Remove: remove the page.
• Lock: lock the page.
• Perms: set page permissions
• History: view the page history. One of the most interesting features of the Wiki is that each time you edit a page the previous version is not discarded but stored in the history. If you have the right permissions you can view previous versions and rollback a page to a previous version if needed. This is how vandalizing is prevented/countered if a page is vandalized it will stay in that state only until a user restores a previous version. In the history screen you can see all the page versions and if you have the right permissions you will see some options for each version, the options are:
  • View: view any version of a page
  • Rollback: rollback a page to any version
  • Source: View the source of that page version
  • Compare: compare the version and the current page side-by-side
  • Diff: view a diff between any version and the current version
• Backlinks: view pages that link to this page. Backlinks are links from any page to the current page (the page you are reading), you can use the backlinks option to see which pages are linking to a particular page and find “orphan” pages, pages with no backlinks. Orphan pages are likely to get very few visits if any and in many ocasions orphan pages are old pages that were removed from the Wiki and you may need to delete them.
• Save to notepad: saves the page to the user personal notepad.
• Similar: view pages similar to this one. Like pages show a listing of pages named similar to the current page. As you know a page is named using CapitalizedWordsSmashedTogether, “like pages” show pages where one of this smashed words is the same as one of the words in the current pages. For example “MyPage NFLResultsPage OpinionsPage” are similar becasue they share the word “Page”.
• Undo: Undo last edit. The undo button can be used to “undo” the last edition of a page, if the “undo” feature is enabled then users that can edit pages can undo what they did even if they can’t rollback pages or remove versions. Note that users will be able to undo only what they edited and not what other users edited unless the user has permission to remove page versions. Pressing the undo button removes tha current version of the page making the last version in the history the current page, if no version is in the history then the page is reverted to an empty page.
• Rename: Rename the page. The rename button can be used to rename a Wiki page, all the references to that page will be updated as well. Note that you must have a permission to rename pages.
• Slides: View page as an slideshow see slideshows later
• Export: Export wiki page as text representation (can be used to import the page later). The export button can be used to export the current version of the page, click it and your browser will prompt you to save the file. The exported page can later be imported to the wiki. If you want to export all the versions of a page you can use the export all versions link when editing the page (click the edit button and find the link). If you want to export all the versions of all the pages in the wiki you can do that as admin from the wiki section of the admin panel.

Editing pages and the Wiki markup syntax

Editing pages is the most important feature of the Wiki. The edit screen allows you to edit a page, preview the page as many times as you want and then save it. To edit pages you use a special syntax common to many Wiki systems that is called “The Wiki Tag System”, this will allow you to use bold text, italics, images and many other things in your pages. If you have the permission you may also use regular HTML code in your Wiki pages thus permitting a page to be anything you want to be. IF you have permission to use HTML you should be able to see a checkbox labeled “Allow HTML” at the bottom of the page. The checkbox is enabled by default, if you uncheck it then HTML tags will be removed when saving the page.

Articles

When logged in, "Home" menu shows more actions, e.g. Add Article.

When adding article, classify it as with organization number.

If event can also set start & end for display.