Platform Architecture

The Salish Sea Restoration Platform is a MediaWiki Installation developed by the Society for Ecologocial Restoration and staff at NOAA, SERNW, WDFW and other partners. This page helps you understand the overall structure of the platform from a technical perspective. Understanding the platform architecture is not required, but deepens your ability to be a good editor.

Basic Facts

Each piece of content we view as a page is an entry in a MySQL database. When you visit a page, a wiki engine grabs the page data and renders the page content using a "skin" and associated codes.
Each page has:
- free text (which can include templates and categories),
- structured data (Created using Page Forms and stored with the Cargo Extension),
- category tags, and
- hidden attributes (mostly associated with the edit log).

You can view pure and undrendered page content by using the [edit source] option (click [[]] in the edit window)

Namespace

Pages are divided into different functional types called "namespaces". Namespace is one of three ways that the platform organizes information (the other two being Categories and Templates). You can always see the namespace by looking at the page title (if there is no prefix with a colon, you are in the "main namespace"). We are using six namespaces:

Main - main pages contain all the content of the wiki. Main pages are
Category - The category namespace has a page for every category in the wiki, and automatically shows the content of that category at the bottom of the page. All the categories are in a category forming a Category Architecture that involves a network of categories and page types (see Page Types below). The top level category containing all categories is Category:All Categories, but there may always be a few uncategorized categories out there.
Template - template pages contain a variety of code that are inserted using template calls, where the template page name is put in the free text
File - File pages are associated with files that have been uploaded into the wiki. this includes both Products and Pictures (see Page Type below).
Form - Forms are pages created using the PageForms extension, that is used to create forms that we are starting to use to control page edits for basic users.
Special - the special namespace contains all the tools and controls for the wiki, and can be viewed at Special:SpecialPages. Access to special pages is controlled by your user privilages. Special pages let you run various scripts and searches.

Categorization

Categories are a lot like tags, in that a single page can be a member of any category, and in addition categories are categorized.

Templates

Templates contain all the recurring information that is used over and over on multiple pages.

Dynamic Page Lists
Content Templates
Formatting Templates - including page type

Page Types

There are nine page types controlled by templates that should encompass every page in the wiki. You designate page type by inserting a template code at the top of a page in "edit source" mode (or selecting page type in a page edit form).

Architecture Page Types

Content Page Types

Free File Pages

Picture - not all files on the wiki are worthy of being called products and having their own main namespace page. These are all the images that are used to dress up a page and make it interesting. These are all assigned the Picture template.

Page Forms and Cargo Attriutes

We are moving towards a combination of Page Forms and Cargo to improve the user interface and quality assurance during page edits.

The Edit Log

Using a variety of Special:SpecialPages Special Pages you can see all the edits that have been made by all users. Here are some useful tools:

Other Important Features