Help:Preferences
From WWR
The preferences pages allow you to personalize some aspects of your Whole Wheat Radio browsing. They apply only when you are logged in.
Contents |
User data
Click the Preferences link at the top of the window, or follow this link to set your preferences.
Real name
- Your e-mail: You may optionally register your e-mail address (it will not be shown publicly on the site, nor will it ever be given out or sold by Whole Wheat Radio). This enables you to reset your password by clicking the "Mail me a new password" box on the log in screen, if you forget it. Additionally, it will enable other registered users to send e-mail to you from the "E-mail this user" link on your user page unless you've checked the disable box (see below).
- Disable e-mail from other users: If you check this, users can not send you e-mail by way of the "E-mail this user" feature, nor can you recover a forgetten password.
Nickname
Although your username is not necessarily your real name and could therefore be called a nickname, the term "nickname" is used here for a name you may optionally specify, different from your username.
The nickname is entered on a page when you type ~~~ or ~~~~ and save the page. This is known in wikiland as your signiture. (If you use the edit toolbar for signing, remember that it gives two dashes before the four tildes.)
Whole Wheat Radio displays your nickname rather than your username in chats.
Language
One can specify an interface language. It shows the default messages, not those in the WWR namespace.
Note that using Spanish as interface language in version up than 1.4.0 shows no Edit toolbar when editing articles (Mozilla and Firefox browsers).
Password
To change your password, enter your old password, the new password, and the new password a second time. (If you are merely changing the other preferences, you do not need to enter your password.)
- Remember password across sessions. Enabling this feature places a HTTP cookie in your browser's cache, which allows the WWR website to recognize you each time you visit the site. You will not have to log in each time you visit.
If you want to use remember my password you have to change your password if it was generated by the software and emailed to you. This is a security feature but often causes trouble for new users.
Skin
Skin options
- Chick
- Cologne Blue
- MonoBook (default)
- MySkin
- Nostalgia
- Simple
- Classic
A skin is a style of page display. (There are differences in the HTML code the system produces (but probably not in the page body), and also different style sheets are used.)
Links at the edges of the page are in different positions. Some links are not present in every skin. In Nostalgia some links are in a drop-down menu instead of directly visible.
Cologne Blue uses a fixed font size unless one specifies in the browser "ignore font sizes specified in the webpage"; even then the line height is fixed; therefore this skin is hardly suitable for a large font.
In MonoBook the width of the panel on the left is dependent on the font size. Therefore, with a large font, the width of the main part of the page is smaller than with other skins.
For Classic with a quickbar and a large font a CSS setting to reduce the size of the quickbar text may be necessary. This depends on the project, specifically on the length of the longest word in the quickbar. If that does not fit in the designated width, there are complications depending on the browser. In Internet Explorer the quickbar overlaps the main text and a vertical line which is intended to separate the two, crosses the main text. In some other browsers the problem does not arise if the quickbar is on the right.
See also Underwear.
Files
Limit images on image description pages to
Options:
- 320x240
- 640x480
- 800x600
- 1024x768
- 1280x1024
- 10000x10000
Here you can specify a limit on the size of images on image description pages.
The large limit 10000x10000 means that one gets the full image.
With a slow connection it is not practical to have to load a large image just to read image info. Also, it may be practical if a large image at first is made to fit on the screen, in the case that the browser does not do that itself. If the image has been reduced there is a link to the full image.
Thumbnail size
Use this setting to control the size of thumbnail images. Note: if a width is specified with a thumbnail tag, the width in the tag overrides your preference setting.
Date format
These options determine how dates that are formatted in wiki code and website generated lists is rendered in your display, and the wikitext shown with your signature.
| Option | Wiki code | ||
| No preference | Dates are shown the way they are formatted on the page | ||
| 16:12, January 15, 2001 | [[January 15]], [[2001]] | ||
| 16:12, 15 January 2001 | [[15 January]] [[2001]] | ||
| 16:12, 2001 January 15 | [[2001]] [[January 15]] | 2001-01-15 16:12:34 | [[2001]]-[[01-15]] |
Time zone
Select your time zone by selected the hours you are offset from UTC time, or click "Fill in from browser".
Editing
- Rows, Columns. Here you choose your preferred dimensions for the edit box used for editing page text.
- Enable section editing via [edit] links. By choosing this option "Edit" links display by each section and by clicking them you edit only the selected section.
- Enable section editing by right-clicking on section titles (JavaScript). Note that in the case of a header with a link (which may occur, although it is not recommended in some projects) this disables opening the link in a new window through right-clicking (an alternative way such as shift-clicking may work). Also other right-clicking functions, such as "Properties", are disabled.
- Edit pages on double click (JavaScript) -
- Edit box has full width. If this box is checked, the edit box (when you click "Edit this page") will be the width of the browser window, minus the quickbar width.
- Show edit toolbar. In compatible browsers, a toolbar with editing buttons can be displayed.
- Show preview on first edit - when pressing the edit button or otherwise following a link to an edit page, show not only the edit box but also the rendered page, just like after pressing "Show preview". This is especially useful when viewing a template, because even just viewing, not editing, typically requires both.
- Show preview before edit box and not after it. If you select this option, the preview will be displayed above the edit box when you click the "Show preview" button while editing a page.
- Add pages you edit to your watchlist. If this option is selected, any pages that you create or modify will be automatically added to your watchlist.
- Mark all edits minor by default. This option automatically selects the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when you edit pages.
- Use external editor by default. Changes editing from online version to external program.
- Use external diff by default. Changes diffing from online version to external program.
Recent changes and stub display
- Number of titles on recent changes: You may select the number of changes which will be shown by default on the Recent Changes and Watchlist page. Once on those pages, links are provided for other options.
- Hide minor edits in recent changes. Registered users may choose to mark edits as being minor (meaning fixes too trivial for trusting users to check up on). It applies to Recent Changes, but not to the Watchlist.
- Enhanced recent changes (not for all browsers). Group recent changes per day by article, display the titles of the changed articles in order from new to old latest change, or in the case of hiding minor edits, latest major change. This feature applies also to Related Changes, but not to the watchlist.
- Threshold for stub display:
Search result settings
- Hits to show per page: You may choose the number of results returned on each page of search results.
- Lines to show per hit is somewhat cryptic; specifying a number n means: "do not show any context if the search term occurs beyond line n in the page"; here a paragraph, as well as the blank line between two paragraphs, each count as one "line"; line breaks in the source, even when not affecting the lay-out of the page (and even when not directly visible in the edit box of the article), affect the line count. Setting the parameter to 5000 or more gives context for every occurrence.
- Characters of context per line: the number of characters of context per occurrence; however, the context is anyway restricted to the "line" (see above) it occurs in. To get the whole line, put a large number like 5000.
- Search in these namespacess by default: shows a list of all namespaces, allowing you to select which ones are searched by default; see also Namespaces searched.
Misc settings
- Underline links. Normally, link text will be underlined. Optionally, you may request that links not be underlined, although your browser may not respect this setting. Normally links that are not underlined can still be recognized by color. However, one can then not distinguish between two consecutive words being a single link or two links, without pointing at the words with the cursor.
- Format broken links like this. An internal link to a non-existing pages is automatically a link to the edit page. By default the link label of [[b]] and [[a|b]] is "b", just like for links to existing pages. Alternatively the link label is a question mark inserted after "b", like this: The weather in London?. Internal links to pages which do not yet exist currently appear on your browser like this: the weather in London. Normally, this is underlined and in red. With the trailing question mark link one can then not distinguish between a single word being linked or a phrase of more than one word, without pointing at the question mark with the cursor. Also, remember that the question mark does not mean that the information is uncertain.
- Justify paragraphs. If set, article paragraphs will be formatted to avoid jagged line endings. If unset, the paragraphs will be formatted as-is.
- Auto-number headings. This adds hierarchical outline-style numbering to headers in articles.
- Disable page caching. This turns off page caching. This is useful if you're experiencing problems of seeing outdated versions of pages, but this comes at a cost of longer loading times.
Browser preferences
Browsers usually also allow you to specify preferences, e.g. font size and font type. The standard skin is compatible with your browser setting of font size and font type. The Cologne Blue skin has most text in a fixed font size, ignoring your browser setting. Some browsers, e.g. IE, allow you to specify that font size specified in the web page is ignored. In that case the font size in Cologne Blue is as specified in the browser, but with the line height not adjusted accordingly. Therefore a large font gives a messy result.
Providing your own CSS
Cascading Style Sheets are used to configure MediaWiki's visual appearance. You can specify your own CSS definitions and overwrite the default settings. See mediawiki.org.
