History

Contributing to the Wiki

Thank you very much for your interest in contributing to our courseware wiki. This is definitely a community effort, and we welcome your involvement.

Following are a few guidelines to help make the process of collaborating on this project a little easier:

  • Please make sure you are a member of the Rails Tutor Google Group and that you have announced your intention to help out on that list. We just want to make sure we know who the participants are so that we can offer encouragement, support, and help as needed.
  • Rails Tutor is a child project of RailsBridge, so you are strongly encouraged to also join the RailsBridge Google Group.
  • The introductory topics for each section (eg. "HTML", "CSS", & "Moving Toward Better Code") should have a brief "What will you learn in this section" prologue (see the HTML topic for an example). This section should be marked as a blockquote, by prepending it with >.
  • Redmine has no built-in context-sensitive navigation, so we will have to build our own, to make traversing the site as easy as possible for the student.

Workflow Process

  • Review the Courseware Outline to find a section that you would like to write about. Available sections are any without a person's name to their right. To claim a section, just edit the outline page and add " - In Progress (your name)" beside the section title.
  • Write your chosen section (see the writing tips below) and save your changes.
  • Edit the outline page again and change the "In Progress" line you added above to "Awaiting Review." Someone will review your contribution, make any necessary changes, and change the status on the outline page to "- Completed (their name)."
  • Anyone is welcome to extend or change a document that is either unspoken for, or is marked completed. Just be sure you "check it out" with "- Editing (your name)" on the outline page. This is the same designation you should use if you review a topic that was previously marked "Awaiting Review."
  • Make sure you put in a Comment any time you commit (Save) changes to any page on the wiki, whether original content, edits, or additions.

Writing Tips

  • Our theme is a Book Discussion Group's website. Please make sure all of your code and logic examples adhere to this theme so that the course will appear to be as cohesive as possible.
  • Make heavy use of materials that are already available by linking to them where appropriate. We should absolutely avoid any appearance of appropriating or plagiarizing anyone else's content. However, there are people that are already doing a fine job of producing screencasts, tutorials, code samples, and other useful materials, and there is no compelling reason for us not to direct students to those valuable resources. Check out the Source Materials page to find great resources you can link to (and feel free to add to that list!)

Style Guide

Redmine uses Textile markup, with a few unique quirks. These are listed below (list will be updated as other "gotchas" are found.)

  • Multi-line code blocks should be set off with opening and closing pre tags. This will preserve line spacing, make the code Courier font, and give the section a lightly tinted background.
  • In-line code (tags, function names, file names, etc.) should be wrapped with @ symbols. This will convert the code to Courier font and render it in-line.
  • In-line code within a line item (<li>) must be wrapped with <code></code> and <code></code> tags.
  • For consistency's sake, please use the following:

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