Introduction

This page tries to explain what this wiki is, how it's organised and the thought behind it.

Motivation

The MediaWiki powered Ogre Wiki is a great resource, but it suffers from several problems:

• The information is hard to find: pages get lost and its not easy to get an overview.
• The information therein is not kept up to date.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a structured wiki instead?
Where each and every page is part of a hierarchy?

There's a lot of quality content in our wiki, so why not take maximum advantage of that wealth of information?

And, in the end, make it easier to update and even extend that resource?

The new Ogre Wiki tries to satisfy those questions.

Structure

The best answer to disorder is order.😊

Picture a room full of randomly arranged books, and imagine trying to find the information you need.
You realise that you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to keep them organised - and one day you become fed up with it.
After much thought, you decide to get six bookshelves to help you organise them.
That would serve as the first, and most important, step towards a total overview.

The Main Sections

The wiki is divided into 6 sections: 'Tutorials', 'Cookbook', 'Libraries', 'Tools', 'Development' and 'Community'.

Those are - under the hood - ordered, hierarchical structures, where each page is either a child, parent or both.

A birds eye view of the sections and what's in them:

1) Tutorials Basic Tutorials Intermediate Tutorials In-Depth Tutorials External Tutorials Older Tutorials	2) Cookbook Codebank Snippets Experiences Articles	3) Libraries Libraries Assembling a Toolset Alternative Languages
4) Tools Tools Exporters DCC Tutorials DCC Articles DCC Resources	5) Development Roadmap Building Ogre Installing An SDK Setting Up An Application FAQs Summer of Code Core Ogre Articles	6) Community Project Using Ogre Contractors Recommended Reading Wiki

Tutorials

This is where the 'official' tutorials live.
This structure is divided into 5 sections:

• Basic Tutorials
• Intermediate Tutorials
• In-Depth Tutorials
  Advanced Tutorials has been abandoned and merged in this section.
• External Tutorials
  Links to tutorials hosted elsewhere.
• Older Tutorials
  Those are tutorials which need a lot of attention to become current.
  Kept mainly due to historical reasons.

Any source code is in child pages of the tutorial page to which they belong.

tutorial overview page uses INCLUDE and the main section pages uses toc...

Cookbook

Snippets, tutorials, articles...

• CodeBank
  WIP a quick way to submit smaller snippets.
• Snippets
  Categorised wiki pages with code.
• Experiences
  Series of 'Post-mortems' covering a wide range of real-world Ogre projects (Needs contributors!)
• Ogre Articles
  Wiki pages *without* code goes here.

Libraries

Libraries goes here - everything which is not a tool.

• Libs
  Addon Libraries - like NxOgre, SkyX, Hydrax, ...
• Alternative Languages
  MOGRE, OgreDotNet, ...
• Assembling A Toolset
  Overview of all the other libraries, besides Ogre, which you might need.

Tools

Exporters, tools, utilities - everything else but code.

• DCC Tools
  Exporters, utilities, ...
• DCC Tutorials
  Various tutorials related to content-creation, tools usage, etc.
• DCC Articles
  Guides, etc. covering tools, arts, pipe-line, ...
• DCC Resources
  List of resources related to tools, assets, ...
• Assembling a Production Pipe-Line
  Overview of the things you might need to get assets into your Ogre projects.

Development

All things related to the development of Ogre goes here: roadmap, how to build Ogre, articles written by the Ogre Team, ...

• Roadmap
• Building Ogre
• Installing the Ogre SDK
• Setting Up An Application
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Google Summer Of Code
• Help Requested
• Ogre Core Articles

Community

'Wiki' is the main bulk of the Community section, but it also contains other, community related information.

• Projects Using Ogre
  Games, tools, engines and frameworks powered by Ogre.
• Recommended Reading
  List of literature recommended by the Ogre community.
• Contractors
  List of people offering Ogre related services commercially.
• Wiki
  Help, guides, to-do lists - the backstage area of this wiki.

The Hidden Sections

In addition to the main, visible sections above, there's several 'hidden' sections or - more accurate: structures in this wiki.

Ogre Lexicon

Ogre Lexicon is a information bank, glossary, vocabulary, you name it - of common terms associated with Ogre and what Ogre is associated with.
All pages in this structure must have names starting with a prepending dash!
See Ogre Wiki Use Cases for instructions on how to add Ogre Lexicon entries.

Templates

This is where you put all the templates for use in the rest of the wiki.
Equivalent to the Template namespace in the old MediaWiki powered wiki.

Users

All user pages should go in this structure.

Talks

This is the old Talks pages.
There's still some good stuff in it, although it's obsoleted by the fact that each page bears a Comments section.
Unlike Talks, the comments are signed by the submitter and there's date and threaded layout as well.
And they're on the page in question.

Sandbox

This is the 'anything-goes' structure.
Use it to train yourself, try out ideas, and keep works in progress.
Ask a WikiAdmin to move, delete or help out if need be.

How does a wikiadmin move a page?

• Go to the structure edit page by clicking the structure edit icon (treelike picture) in the structure nav header.
• Find the page and click the delete icon (red cross).
• Remove only from structure. (Important!)
• Confirm your action.
• While still on the structure edit page, find the page where you want your new page to be a child of, and click the View button (magnifier image).
• When you're viewing the page in question, enter the name of the page you deleted from the structure into the Add Page text field and check the 'Child' box, just like you would add a new child page.
• If the page exists - which we know it does - it will be added as a child of the page.

The Main Decisions

A structured wiki comes at a price: You can't just create a page and start writing.
You need to think about where to put the page first.

Therefore some decisions has been made.

All pages must belong to a structure

All pages, except the Main page and the Sandbox belongs to a structure.

That means that to add a page, you need to first navigate to the place where you want the page to be put.

New pages should be added from the structure header 'Add Page' textbox, not by clicking a yet-to-be-created wiki link.

Although the 'stray' page can be added to a structure after it's creation, it's far easier to do it right from the onset.

Benefits:

Drawbacks:

Ogre Lexicon page names are prepended with a dash

To avoid name clashing with regular wiki pages, all pages in the Ogre Lexicon must be created from the Ogre Lexicon structure, and their name must be prepended by as dash.
For instance, to add a new Ogre Lexicon entry for 'Wiki', create a page called -Wiki.

In order to make a lexicon page turn up on the Ogre Lexicon table of contents, you need to categorise it as 'Lexicon' - when adding a new page to the Ogre Lexicon structure, the page will automatically inherit the 'Lexicon' category, otherwise use the 'Categorise' tool in the sidebar.

That means that Wiki and -Wiki refers to two different things: a regular wiki page and an Ogre Lexicon entry.
Use the LEX wiki-plugin - the button on the toolbar - to link to the -Wiki lexicon entry: {LEX()}Wiki{LEX}.

Benefits:

• You don't have to worry about wiki page names and lexicon page names because they can never clash.
• Links to the Ogre Lexicon looks different from regular links. What You See Is What You Get.
• When hovering over the Ogre Lexicon links with your mouse pointer, a title will show the description of the page. Therefore you can stay on the page in question, if the description is enough to enlighten you. 😊
• When reading a page with lots of Ogre Lexicon links, you will not get too distracted, because the links are styled to be less intrusive.

Drawbacks:

• A bit more work is involved.

Where To Put It

This wiki has been carefully organised to ensure a logical and intuitive structure, but even so, some things are not easily categorised and could belong in more than one section.

Pages

Files and Images

Features

Productivity

Overview

Nothing Gets Lost

Hot Out Of The Oven

The Ogre Wiki Tracker

The Codebank

The Ogre Lexicon

Plusses And Minuses

More Power More Responsibility

The Inevitable Tiki Versus MediaWiki

Let's put it this way:

That sums it up nicely.

To elaborate a bit, let's look at the differences:
Categories Tags
HTML CSS
Speciality Versatility

Tiki Contributions

phpBB Authentication

Plugin TRANSCLUDE

Plugin Toc Improvement

Alternative Center Tag

Ogre Wiki Specifics

Plugin LEX

Plugin WIKIPEDIA

Plugin CUT

Custom Structure Administration Templates

Conclusion

What Now?

Use Cases

Ogre Wiki Use Cases