History: Ogre Wiki Overview
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Ogre Wiki - The Grand Overview
About the Ogre Wiki and how it's organised. |
Introduction
This page tries to explain what this wiki is, how it's organised and the thought behind it.
Table of contents
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:
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1) Tutorials
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2) Cookbook
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3) Libraries
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4) Tools
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5) Development
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6) Community
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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 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.
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?