This site is maintained collaboratively using a wiki (PmWiki, to be exact) that anyone can edit. We do want to limit editing to families active in supporting EMID, so you do need to get a password to edit the site. Just contact info@emidfamilies.org to get a password. If you would rather not edit pages yourself you are welcome to send suggested additions and changes to that address as well.
How do I start editing?
To edit any page, click on the "Edit" link at the bottom of the page.
The system will ask you to enter a password. Enter the password you got from info@emidfamilies.org.
You will then see a page that has a form on it. The biggest text area on that form will contain the text of the page. Just make your changes there. Entering text is pretty simple, for the most part what you type is what will appear on the page. But there are some special features you can use and those are described in the section about "WikiMarkup" below.
The "Summary" field of the form is optional, if you wish you can type in a brief explanation for the change you made to the text. You can also just leave it blank.
The "Author" field should be filled in with your name.
Then click "Save".
That's it, you've made a change to the EMID Families site.
What is WikiMarkup?
The wiki tool we are using, PmWiki, will look for some special formatting hints in the text you type. Underneath the "Save" button on the editing form will be some hints about these special characters to remind you. For example, if you want a line to be a headline you would put "!!" at the very front of the line. More about the WikiMarkup supported by PmWiki can be found at BasicEditing and TextFormattingRules.
What if I want to add a page?
The easiest way to add a page to the wiki is to simply refer to it in your text. So, if I want to add a page called MyTwoCents to the wiki, I would add the text "please have a look at [[MyTwoCents]]" to the text of the page that already exists.
Once I save that text, the page would have a link to "MyTwoCents" followed by a small question mark. The question mark indicates that there is no real "MyTwoCents" page yet. That's OK. Just click on that link anyway. You will be presented with a message that lets you create the MyTwoCents page. Just edit that page as you would any other.
A note about page names: You should always name your page with a single word that starts with a capital letter. If you want to have multiple words, just squish them together like I did MyTwoCents with capital letters separating each word.
By default, that name will become the title of the page you create. However, since it is good to keep page names short (they become part of the URL that people type to get to your page, after all) and you sometimes want your page title to be longer (it is nice to have a title that means something), there is a way to make the title different. To do this, just include the line "(:title This is my cool title:)" somewhere in the text of your page. Whatever words you put after the "title" on this line will become the title of your page. This page is an example: the name of the page is simply "Help" to stay short, but the title is "Help for editing this site".