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Text Formatting Help

Input Form

Every form used to edit a forum post, blog entry or any other type of content on this site contains a title and a text body input filed. They are named slightly different, depending on the content type, though (Title, Subject, Body, Description, etc).

WYSIWYG Editing

You have the option to turn on a rich text editor for the large text body field. It supports styled text, like bullet lists, tables, etc. You may switch back and forth between rich text mode and plain text mode.

Language

This site is multi-lingual. For this to work, you must make sure the language setting is correct when editing content. The site's default language is English (US) and its other language is German. If you create English content that you can not (yet), or don't want to translate to German, you must set the language to Language neutral. This ensures that German (and other non-English) visitors will still see your English content (most people in the world are at least marginally able to decipher English text).

Language seting is irrelevant in the user forum.

Tags

Tagging your content is extremely important, because other users want to find it! New posts quickly move down the "recent posts" list and may get entirely out of reach, if they are not tagged appropriately. Please regard the following important guidelines for tagging:

  • When typing a tag name, wait for the tagging widget to show its suggestions in a dropdown list.
  • Pick a term from the list where possible.
  • Please do not create new terms, unless absolutely necessary! If you do not seem to immediately get the intended term, please think a bit and try synonyms or other spelling.
  • Note that entering a term not in the suggested list will create a new term in the database!
  • If you can not avoid this, please make the new term all lowercase, always in the singular (single object) form and use US English spelling.

Attaching Images, Movies and Music

You can upload and attach media files to your postings and have them appear inlined in your text. There is a special form item for this, labeled Attach files to this post. Upload your files first, then refer to them in your text body using the following tags:

  • [inline file="1"]
    Embeds the first attached file.
  • [inline file="myvideo.mov"]
    [inline file="mymusic.mp3"]
    Automatically embeds an appropriate media player, depending on the filename extension. 
  • [inline file="myimage.jpg"]
    [inline dile="myimage.jpg" class="inline-left"]
    Embeds an attached image file. You have the option to additionally specify a CSS class name that affects page layout.

Available CSS class namea are: inline (default: image included as a new paragraph), inline-left (image floating left of text), or inline-right (image floating right of text).