Editing Publisher:Beyond-Social (section)

== Editorials ==

Beside a custom Main Page, we developed a special type of article page for the Beyond Social wiki: editorials. An editorial is a type of article that anyone can create. It is a page where a list of various articles can be collected, and accompanied with a short introduction and image. Editorials can be used for example to highlight a specific theme that appears in Beyond Social, or to bring a set of student projects together that have been created in the same year. These are example, the author of an editorial is free to curate article together according to his own interests.

Editorials are created through a [http://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Form:Editorial form], for which we used the Semantic MediaWiki page forms. (See [http://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Special:FormEdit/Editorial/example this test editorial] for an example). Thanks to the form and its predefined structure, it is easier to create an editorial. The form includes input fields with an autofill function, which makes it easier to search for specific articles and image files on the wiki. The form is connected to a [http://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Template:Editorial template] by including this syntax:

{{{for template|Editorial|label=Form to create an Editorial}}}

The template displays every editorial in the same layout, which makes them easily recognizable as being a special type of page. At the moment that a form is published, the wiki creates an article page and writes the content of the form into the structure of the template.

To create the list of article selections, we needed an option which would let the author free in deciding how many article he/she wanted to include in his/her editorial. To add a # number of articles, we looked for a way in which a single part of a form can be repeated for a # of times. As we only wanted this smaller part of the form to be repeated, we created a seperate [http://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Template:Article_Selection Article Selection] template:

{{{for template|Article Selection|multiple|label=Select articles|add button text=Add article}}}

The 'multiple' option in this line enables an add button in the interface of the form, together with a drag-and-drop function to change the order and a delete button to remove items from the list. At the moment that a form is published, the content of the list is placed in the Template:Article Selection. In the template, the wiki receives the list with the '#arraymap' function, which is a function that work with a list of items and repeats the Article Selection template as many times as there are items in the list:

{{#arraymap:{{{Articles|}}}|,|x|[[x]]}}

For more detailed information, there is a longer explanation [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Page_Forms/Page_Forms_and_templates#arraymap here] on the MediaWiki site.

After publishing an editorial, the page can be edited through the form again. To do this, Semantic MediaWiki offers the option to add an &quot;Edit with form&quot; option to the action menu, see for example [http://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Social_Design_Projects_and_Positions here]. For more info see this [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Page_Forms/The_%22edit_with_form%22_tab MediaWiki documentation page].