My group (Mooresville) decided each member would create his or her own layout for the home page of the wiki. Diane mentioned that she really liked the St. Joseph Subject Guide Wiki, so my thought was to emulate their layout for the Mooresville Wiki's homepage. In an attempt accommodate people with monitors set to 800x600, switched the layout from three columns to two. A few minutes later, I had a nice enough looking page.
Well, kind of. The table tool in the Wikispaces editor lacks a lot of the options one would have with standard HTML code. The text was slammed a bit too close to the borders for my taste. More troubling, the shorter column was vertically aligned to the center of the table, instead of starting flush to the top, which looked rather bad. Eventually, I created a new theme for the wiki, copying the old one and adding in a bit of CSS code to fix up the table so it looked as pictured above. A bit annoying, but no big deal. However, as I turned my attention to the rest of the page, a rather troubling bug popped up. After saving any changes to the page, though I didn't edit the table any more, the result was this:
My headers and lists in the table had lost their formatting. Somehow a few line breaks in the code were deleted inside the table. I fixed it and tried again... and again... and again. But no matter what I did, the table format was always ruined the next time it was saved. Looking into the help section, I found the problem listed in their bug list along with a host of others.Alright. No problem. I could insert my own HTML and make the table from scratch. This worked splendidly... until I tried to edit it. I couldn't. No one can. The table appeared as a little gray block in the editor. I could resize the block (fat lot of good that does anyone) and delete it, but that was it. Switching to the text editor was even less helpful. I could make a nice table for the front page, but no one would ever be able edit it, defeating the point of the wiki entirely.
Between the bugs and streamlined editors designed to help the non-programmer types out there, I couldn't get through to fix the problem. Of course, you can layout a nice page without tables or columns, but it sure doesn't help matters.
-Joe
P.S. Come to think of it, this makes wonder how the Butler group is going to handle making the new-fangled hybrid wiki Butler is requesting.
UPDATE (10/10/07) : After doing some more digging, I found a wiki that explains how to create your own wiki themes. Turns out it shows the correct way to make columns too (avoiding the table tool). I'll add the link to the classwork wiki too.
http://themes.wikispaces.com/
3 comments:
Oooh, it was painful to read your post, Joe. What an exercise in frustration. Good for you for digging deeper and finding the themes wiki. I am loving waht both groups are doing with their wikis! It's exciting to see them coming together.
If you could see me now, you would see a person genuflecting in awe of another's great patience and persistence and knowledge. Your description of completing that assignment makes my eyes widen. Ohmigosh-the thought of dipping the nail of my pinkie into the vast multi-paged sea of wikispaces that you leapt into to work on the home page makes me feel almost physically ill.
You are amazing. Thank you for your contributions to the Mooresville page.
May you graduate and get a fabulous job where your talents are recognized and compensated well.
I, too, wonder what Butler will do to get around this problem. Have you heard from them?
Joe,
Last night it occurred to me that not only might Butler enocunter the kind trouble you did, but so would MPL employees, no? Woudln't they trip up like you did? That would be problematic.
Sue
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