Using Collections - They're like Folders

Collections are like folders that show up to the right of your home screen to help you get organized when you start accumulating pads.

 

To create a collection, go to your home screen (click on "hackpad" in the upper left of the screen). In the upper right, you'll see an option to add a collection.

Screenshot1_collections

Once you've created a collection, its name will appear to the right side of your home screen.

To add a pad to a collection, you can simply drag and drop a pad into the collection from your home screen. From within a pad you are working on, you can search for a collection by name in the invite search bar on the right.

Click on the collection name, to go to the list of pads in the collection. From here you can search to add pads to the collection in a bar near the top of the screen.

Screenshot2_collections

Collections are useful for organizing team members or project collaborators. You can invite people to a collection by typing their name into the invite search bar. Invited people will have access to all the pads that have been added to the collection.

You can also make a collection public so that anyone can join it. Here's a public collection we made to gather together all the Hackpad Welcome Pads.

Filed under  //   collections   features  
 

Live Editing MediaWiki with Hackpad

We all love Wikipedia. But Wikipedia's 2002-era web editing tech leaves something to be desired.  Last week Hackpad was invited in to the Wikimedia Foundation offices in downtown San Francisco to whip up a prototype for live-edited MediaWiki pages.

Screen_shot_2011-05-09_at_11

Live editing a wiki page makes a lot of sense for things like storing meeting minutes and writing specs. Anywhere where multiple people need to update a page at the same time.

Eventually, with enough polish we're hopeful that the Wikipedia community might adopt collaborative editing to enable group editing sessions, and this prototype is a first step towards that goal.

Here is a recap of the steps required to get this prototype running for any MediaWiki instance, so you can try it out yourself.  It doesn't require administrator access, and instead leverages MediaWiki user scripts.

FIrst, create a new user page called vector.js (or equivelent based on your MediaWiki theme) underneath your user home page, and insert the following:

importScriptURI("https://hackpad.com/static/js/mediawiki-embed.js");
Here's an example script defined for user Igorkofman on mediawiki.org:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Igorkofman/vector.js

After you save the vector.js file you'll see a HackPad tab at the top of pages you visit. Clicking the HackPad tab will create a new anonymous pad loaded with the wikitext of the page, or join an existing pad for that page if others are currently editing.

Your changes and changes from others will show up in real-time with the author's username shown in the margin.

When you're finished editing collaboratively, just click the Save button as normal and the pad text is saved back to MediaWiki, with author names automatically filled in the comment section.

If you administer a MediaWiki and you'd like to try this out, see the directions here to install a user script for all users.

In the coming days we'll be working with WikiMedia to get a shared code repository setup, so this integration can evolve to better support collaborative editing within MediaWiki. Exciting stuff!
Filed under  //   hackpad   mediawiki  

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