TB Wiki Help and How-To

TalkBass Wiki How-To and Help

Creating a new page​

To create a new page, click "Create New Page" in the sub-navigation header. Enter an appropriate title, and the link URL field will fill in automatically.


Screenshot of page creation screen

Leave "Parent Node" set to "unspecified" unless your page fits under another page as a sub-page. Leave "Redirect" set to "unspecified" unless you're creating a page simply to redirect it (link it to) another page.

Upload any number of attachments just as you would for a forum post.

Page Editor​

To edit a page, select the Edit button, located at the top on the right side. A page composition window will appear. The frame at the top with the icons should look familiar, it's what you see when composing a message in the TalkBass forums. The function associated with each icon is displayed by hovering over them. This provides all the basic tools for specifying fonts, formatting style, creating lists, inserting links, images, media, as well as emoticons such as smiles.

Formatting Your Page With a Table-of-Contents and Headings​

Add headers [h#] and [/h#], where # is 2, 3, 4, etc, in the text and the table of contents will be automatically generated. You have to start at the second header level, [HEADING=1].




The code produces the following table of contents:



The indentation helps organize the table of contents by grouping related topics. This can also be seen in this pages table of contents at the top of the page.


The sections with text will resemble the following:

Sample Main Heading​

This is a paragraph of plain text under a major heading

Sub Heading 1​

This is a paragraph of plain text under a sub heading

Sub Heading 2​

This is a paragraph of plain text under a sub heading
[h5]Sub-Sub Heading[/h5]
This is a paragraph of plain text under a minor heading
[h6]Sub-Sub-Sub Heading[/h6]
This is a paragraph of plain text under a minor heading

Sub Heading 3​

This is a paragraph of plain text under a minor heading

• You can have multiple main and sub headers. Sub heading 1, 2, and 3 are all at the same level.
• Headers are nested. [HEADING=2] headers are indented under their [HEADING=1] header in the table of contents.
• The lower the heading level, the smaller the font.
• The body of the text is a consistent size, irrespective of heading that it is associated with.

What are BB Codes?​

BB Codes can be used for more in-depth page creation. As seen above, BB Codes are used for formatting headers but much more can be accomplished by using them.

BB Codes, or Bulletin Board Codes are tags used to format text. The tags are easily identified, they are wrapped in square brackets. For every Open tag, there is a matching close tag. An Open tag such as [B], which signifies bold text, must have a matching close tag [/B]. Tags are not case sensitive, they can be upper or lower case.

Here are some examples: BB Codes | TalkBass.com that will help you get started. If you find BB Codes on the internet that don't work here, it's because subset that's in place was designed to keep the system simple and efficient.

Uploading a file works that same way as it does in the forums. Also, like the forums, there is a BB Code Editor that allows you to see the BB codes. This can be handy for fixing errors and hand coding entries such as links.

The icon on the right side, Use BB Code Editor, can be used to work at a lower level to refine the composition of the page. This isn't necessary but some people prefer to work this way and it can be useful for correcting issues. With this editor, you can view and edit the BB codes as well as the text within the page.

Some examples for the more commonly used BB Codes are presented in the sections that follow.

Bold, Italic, Underline, and Struck-Through​

Produces:

Bold text
Italic text
Underlined text
Struck through text

Bold underlined text

Note that the codes can be combined or nested to apply more than one operation on the text string. For example, you can have both bold and underlined text. Care must be taken with the order of nested open and close tags. If an error occurs, check or change the order of the nested tags. In the last example, bold is specified within the confines of the underline open and close tags.

Font, Color, and Size​

This is Veranda text.
This is red and blue text.
This is small and big text.


There are different ways of specifying a color, two of which are by name or hexadecimal code. The example above specifies the color by name as RED. If you want a color shade, a hexadecimal color number can be used. This allows for more variation. Codes for colors can be looked up by searching for Hexadecimal HTML Color Codes. Here is a good resource: HTML Color Values.

The list of available fonts includes Arial, Book Antiqua, Courier New, Georgia, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Veranda. There are fonts that are considered web safe in that they are compatible with different browsers and systems. Here's one reference: CSS Web Safe Fonts. The easiest way to determine if a font is supported is to try it.

Links​

Normally you can insert a link that you copied from somewhere else. It may not look the way that you want it to. Edit the page, select the BB Code Editor at the top right of the window, scroll down to the link and edit it. Using the link above, here is an example:



This code produces: TalkBass BB Codes.

Note that the URL is wrapped in single quotes. The text "TalkBass BB Codes" is what you see as the link. The link will still work without it but having the custom text helps draw more attention to the link within the text. Note that the code can all be on a single line. It was shown in three lines for clarity. If you make a mistake, the link will look more like the source code. If this happens, go into the BB Code Editor and look for something that is out of place such as a missing bracket or quote. It's usually a simple fix.

Uploading Images and Other Files​

Place your cursor in the text where you want an image to reside. Click on the Upload a File button, locate and select the image on your system. Once it uploads, select either Thumbnail or Full Image. Save the page.

If the image does not load where you want it, there is a Delete button, you can reposition your cursor and reload the image. An alternative is to enter the BB Code Editor, find the code for the image and relocate that segment by cutting and pasting. The latter approach sounds more complicated than it is, it is easy to do.

Other files such as pdf documents are more complicated. At the present time, pdf files are loaded into the page's attachments directory and not displayed in the body of the text. Click on attachments at the top of the page to see the contents of the directory. On your computer, copy the link, then paste the link into the body of the page's text.

For example, there is a file in this page's attachments directory called berklee_tips_on_buying_a_bass.pdf. Copy the link on your computer. On a Mac, control click on the link, select Copy Link. Paste it into the page's text where you want it located, then save the page. On a PC, right click on the file, select Create shortcut, move or copy the shortcut to where you want it to appear in the page's text. It will appear in the text as shown below, save the page. You can enter the BB Code Editor to see the code for the link and move it if necessary.

berklee_tips_on_buying_a_bass.pdf

Media Links​

Media links are easy to include in your text. They are the same as a link to a file as describes above. Simply copy the link, position your cursor in the page's text, paste the link, save the page. A link to Youtube is shown below.

Paul McCartney on the Upright Bass

The code consists of a URL tag and path wrapped in single quotes and title:

Tables​

Tables can be created with the [table], [th], [tr] and [td] tags. They define the table, header, rows, and cell (data) content.

An example is presented below.


This code produces the following table.

Lists​

A bullet list:


This code produces:

• Item 1
• Item 2

A numbered list:

(this feature is currently not working)


This code produces:

1. Item 1
2. Item 2