TOTEM TWiki rules

TWiki is a great technology, but without rules, conventions and a bit of coordination, a TWiki web can easily become messy. Here are a few simple TOTEM TWiki rules that will evolve on the basis of experience. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

For guidelines and advice about web usability, see what Jakob Nielsen has to say. At any rate, even with the best rules and convention, in a few years from now the extensive TOTEM TWiki will probably require some refactoring. At that time, see how Paolo Palazzi organized the redesign of the BaBar web in 1998.

Headers

• start the page with an H1 header ( ---+ Title ...), with a meningful title that helps to understand the context;

• just below add at least one summary paragraph to summarize what comes below and make the scope of the page even clearer;

• in the same spirit, when inserting H2 and H3 headers, always insert a paragraph after a header before you insert a lower level header, unless the context is crystal-clear;

Grouping

The TOTEM TWiki pages are organized with the same groups as the main TOTEM web, and also the TOTEM hypernews:

• A. Organization
• B. Detector
• C. Electronics
• D. Trigger/DAQ
• E. DCS
• F. Offline Software
• G. Physics
• H. Documentation
• I. Miscellaneous

and it would be interesting to try and maintain the consistency also at the lower levels; this will require some discussions and adjustments from time to time;

Page names

• the page names should be self-explanatory and reflect the same organization as the groups, for example: CompDcsGlossary or CompOfflineswVFAT2FrameSpecification.

• the beginning of the name can be omitted if the rest of the name is unambiguous; for example, the name of the page containing the DCS Glossary could be shortened from CompDcsGlossary to DcsGlossary, but not to Glossary, because there might be several TOTEM glossaries other than the DCS one.

• when in Rome, do like the Romans: the TWiki WikiWord style, with strings of two or more words with initial capitals run together, does not match with acronyms that are all uppercase; when appropriate, give priority to the WikiWord style, for example when using the acronym DCS within a WikiWord, spell it Dcs, like in CompDcsGlossary.

Access rights

Currently, most TOTEM TWiki pages are visible to the world, but editable only by users in TotemGroup. In the future this may change depending on the TOTEM information access policy.

If you wish to restrict the access to a given page to a given TWikiGroup (SomeGroup), then

1. click on MoreTopicActions at the bottom of the chosen page
2. click EditSettings
3. copy and paste the two lines listed below:

   @asterisk@ Set DENYTOPICVIEW = Main.TWikiGuest
   @asterisk@ Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = Main.SomeGroup

In the same way, access can be granted to an e-group: in the preceding example replace Main.SomeGroup with some-e-group.

If you want to grant access to selected people, use this:

   @asterisk@ Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = Main.LeszekGrzanka , Main.PaoloPalazzi

Notice that TWiki has strict formatting rules, so please make sure that you have three spaces, an asterisk, and an extra space in front of any access control rule.

These access control rules could also be added directly in the body of the page.