Content Style Guide and Workflow

Audience: iDigBio content creators, iDigBio Wiki staff content creators

The following are some guidelines to help content creators make consistent documents.

Suggested style elements

1. date
2. version
3. audience
4. tags

Content Tagging

Our tagging supports our website design: this helps direct content to the right sub-sites, however this control is not fully developed yet. Our tagging supports how our design operates: this helps assure that content is searchable according to the existing Drupal custom-made views of the content. See Drupal tags below. Within each technology, at least one of the default tags should be used in each piece of content. The number of recommended tags could grow with need. Use tags that encapsulate the subject of your content, there is no need to re-iterate the title.

Effort should be made to use the same universe of tags in both content systems.

in Drupal

The following are a set of recommended content-related Drupal view-supported tags, choosing one for each piece of Drupal content will give it the highest priority under documentation:

• Cyberinfrastructure
• Data Ingestion
• Database
• Digitization
• Documentation
• Education
• Outreach
• Policy
• Public Participation
• Workflow
• Workshop

• Blog is a special Drupal tag that makes sure the content shows up on this page https://www.idigbio.org/news, under 'News Articles'

Put the tag(s) you choose into the 'Tags' field when you 'Add Content'.

in Wiki

Wiki tags are created with a syntax like

[[Category:tag]]

and can put anywhere in the content. If practical, put them at the top of the content so that they are easily found.

Our current tag definitions are here https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Categories.

When to use Wiki

Wiki content is by default always published. It is intended to be a means for collaboration with colleagues on staff and within our community.

When to use Drupal

Drupal content are documents that are not likely to be so collaborative in nature once they are published. They are meeting reports, policy, webforms.

For iDigBio staff and named working groups or participants, there is a feature to upload files via our content management system. The only restrictions on this space are the physical limitations of our servers and file system. The easiest way to use this service is to log into iDigBio and visit:

https://www.idigbio.org/imce

Authorized users see a file browser. You can see that there are directories for workshop presentations and workshop images. Navigate to "workshop-presentations" or "workshop-images' and then to your file folder of interest. Use the "Upload" tool at the top of the screen to place files. If not already there, create a folder for the workshop of interest, make the name unambiguous.

Linking to this content is easy. Highlight the file you just uploaded by clicking on it. At the bottom of the file browser window you should see "File URL path". Copy this and place "www.idigbio.org" in front of it, and you have a valid URL to this file. Once you have filled in the link to the document, given it the appropriate tags (see above), make it published. The state of 'Unpublished' does not prevent it from being found in the iDigBio Google search box. If you want it to be in the homepage carousel, be sure to give it the 'Featured' tag.

News

This is another view of certain kinds of Drupal documents based on their tags. Tagging something with 'Blog' makes it show up in the 'New Articles' column here: https://www.idigbio.org/news

Wayward Content

There are several ways we keep track of wayward content:

1. Orphaned pages: https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Special:LonelyPages - content that appear here are either purposefully left unlinked because they are under development, or neglectfully because they have become unattached.
2. https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Special:UnusedFiles - content that appears here is usually mis-formatted in thier attachment link but not orphaned. Making sure all of content here is referenced can also reveal redundant or abandoned files. If a Wiki document is referenced in a Drupal document,, it will show up in this report.
3. Drupal offers a link rot report, but it often contains a lot of false positives, especially in the domain of 'tiny URLs'.

Linking to Content

documentation [[Media:]] [[File:]]

Searching

There are numerous ways to search for content, and depending on where you choose, the results will vary:

1. a plain Google search
2. a site specific Google search
3. a site specific Wiki search - returns only Wiki pages
4. using the browser find command (^f) - returns only content on the current page

Note: none of the search strategies search within .pdf or .doc documents. This is one of the motivations to make tags useful for finding content.