Creating your first Wikidot site

Posted by Helmut_pdorf on 18 Jun 2008 10:19, last edited by DrCaduceus on 31 May 2016 09:13

Tags: first newbie site start

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Creating your first Wikidot site

To create a new site, click here.

Title

The site title is shown on every page of your generated site. It is an alpha-numeric name, which can contain spaces and most special characters.

Example: The title for this site is "Wikidot Community".

Tagline

The tagline is optional. In most CSS themes, it is displayed beneath the site name at the top of your website.

The content of this field is displayed under the "site name" on the top header of your wiki site. It is a short description of your site and should be at most a short sentence in length.

Example: "The place for help and advice!"

Web address

The site name is what everyone will know your wiki as, and determines the URL that needs to be entered into an Internet browser to access the new site after it has been generated.

Limits:

  • Minimum 3 characters in length
  • Maximum 30 characters in length
  • Only alpha-numeric characters are allowed, and hyphens. No spaces can be used in the site name.

Example: The web address for this site is "community". Because of this, you can access it by typing community.wikidot.com into your Internet browser's address bar.

Interface Language

Choose the language for most system-based elements on your new Wikidot site.

While many languages are listed as stable, there are many more that are currently experimental. You can help us to translate Wikidot, and make your native language stable as well!

Access Policy: Open, Closed or Private?

Your access policy can be one of the following:

Open: Anyone can view your content and become member whenever they want. Great for wikis!
Closed: Anyone can view your content, but membership is restricted and you must either manually invite users or give them the ability to apply for membership and have it approved by an administrator.
Private: The site's content is hidden from the public, and only members of the Wikidot site can view and edit the content.

If you are new to Wikidot and your site has little useful content on it yet, we recommend keeping your site either Open or Closed (i.e. not Private), as this allows the community to more easily help you with any questions you may have.

You can change the access policy at any time from your site manager (usually located on the admin:manage page).

Initial pages

The initial pages that exist when you create your wiki depends on the template that is chosen at creation time.

Welcome page (aka. homepage / start)

By default, your home page is named start, and has the title "Welcome to your new Wikidot site".

The content of this page is continually evolving, and is dependent on the template that you chose when you created your Wikidot site. Usually, the page includes useful help information, and advice regarding how to edit your site and/or upgrade to a Pro account at Wikidot for extra features.

Summary of common pages on most templates

Title Category Name
Welcome to your new Wikidot site _default start
Side nav nav:side
Top Bar Menu nav nav:top
Recent Changes system system:recent-changes
List All Pages system system:list-all-pages
Join This Site system system:join
Site Members system system:members
Page Tags system system:page-tags-list
No title system system:page-tags
Search the site search search:site
How To Edit Pages - Quickstart _default how-to-edit-pages
Contact _default contact
What is a Wiki Site? _default what-is-a-wiki-site
Manage Site admin admin:manage

After enabling the built-in forum

If you enable the Wikidot forum, the following pages will be created automatically. Do not move/rename/delete these pages, as they are needed for the forum to operate correctly.

Title Category Name
Forum Thread forum forum:thread
Forum Categories forum forum:start
Forum Category forum forum:category
Recent Forum Posts forum forum:recent-posts
Recent Threads forum forum:recent-threads
New Forum Thread forum forum:new-thread

Video Tutorial

If you'd like a video tutorial to help you with the creation and initial editing of your Wikidot site, we have embedded one for you below:

The next step

Once you have read through this page, and are confident that you understand, have a look at our New Wikidot Site Checklist.


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