Creating Content

There are two main ways of creating and maintaining content for use with ewok.

The first is to create and maintain the content outside, uploading it to ewok for staging and publishing (Upload in the ewok file manager), and downloading for further editing (download in the file manager). For file formats that typically require specialised tools (images, video, word processor documents, spreadsheets etc.) this is the standard approach. Text-based content (text, HTML, scripts, etc.) can be created and maintained in the same way using your external tool of choice (vi, Dreamweaver, or an IDE, for example).

Alternatively, text-based content can be created and maintained within ewok using the file manager (using Create and edit in the file manager). This option is extremely useful for quick corrections or modest changes (more substantial revisions are probably still best done externally using a full-featured editor).

ewok Text Markup

Another way in which ewok assists with content creation is in allowing HTML content to be created using simple text formatting (something like text-based email) rather than requiring full-scale HTML. This removes a significant barrier preventing non-technical users being able to create content, and allows them a much more gentle learning curve, ranging across:

• simple text-based content (very much like email) using minimal markup features (perhaps just paragraphs, headings, emphasis, and simple lists)
• more complex text-based content using more powerful markup features, such as links, more complex lists, classes and styles, etc.
• text-based content interspersed with html statements, for more precise control and options
• full html-content, either handcrafted or created via a tool like Dreamweaver or Frontpage

Text-based content creation also has the benefit of being surprisingly productive even for the HTML-adept, partly because it is much less verbose than HTML, and partly because it naturally helps in the separation of content from presentation.

Simple Text Markup

Simple text markup can be illustrated by showing what the previous section actually looks like:

  ewok Text Markup
  ----------------

  The other way in which ewok assists with content creation is in allowing 
  HTML content to be created using simple text formatting (something like 
  text-based email) rather than requiring full-scale HTML. This removes a
  significant barrier preventing non-technical users being able to create
  content, and allows them a much more gentle learning curve, ranging 
  across:

   - simple text-based content (very much like email) using minimal markup 
     features (perhaps just paragraphs, headings, *emphasis*, and simple 
     lists)

   - more complex text-based content using more powerful markup features,
     such as links, more complex lists, classes and styles, etc.

   - text-based content interspersed with html statements, for more 
     precise control and options

   - full html-content, either handcrafted or created via a tool like 
     Dreamweaver or Frontpage

  Text-based content creation also has the benefit of being surprisingly 
  productive even for the HTML-adept, partly because it is much less verbose
  than HTML, and partly because it naturally helps in the separation of content
  from presentation.

This example provides a useful range of features from just four rules:

1. Paragraphs (i.e. text separated by blank lines) become HTML paragraphs
2. Underlined single-line paragraphs turn into HTML headings (using equals signs === create level 1 headings, hyphens --- level 2s, and tildes ~~~ level 3s)
3. Indented lines beginning with a hyphen become unordered list items (note that subsequent lines must also be indented to the same level, as shown)
4. Phrases surrounded with asterisks become emphasised

More Complex Text Markup

Here are some examples of more complex text markup functionality. A complete reference is available in Appendix A: Text Markup Reference.

• links can be created using double-quoted strings ("label") followed by a colon and a path name, an http or mailto url, or an email address e.g. "this page":content.html -> this page
• ordered lists can be created using indented lines beginning with the sequence 'N.' (capital-N,dot). To explictly control the kind of numbering used you can also use Na., NA., Ni., and NI., for letter-based (a, b, c, d and A, B, C, D) and roman-numeral based (i, ii, iii, and I, II, III) numeration. Again, subsequent lines must be indented to the same level as the text of the initial line
• indented lines that do not begin with an ordered or unordered list special token are treated as preformatted sections (HTML <pre> sections)

ewok HTML Markup

The above ewok text markup converts text documents into HTML on the fly. In addition to this, ewok does a small amount of HTML markup, applied to both proper HTML files and text content ewok has just converted to HTML.

ewok applies the following HTML markup:

• HTML headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) automatically have named anchors added to them unless the 'markup_heading_anchors' metadata item is set to "No". This allows all headings to be used as section targets like this one - the target name is generally the heading lowercased with all spaces and punctuation sequences converted to an underscore ("ewok_html_markup", for example)
• if a <contents> tag is found in the file (or if metadata 'auto_contents' is set to "Yes" for the item) ewok will insert a simple contents listing at that point (or at the beginning of the body section for auto_contents) containing links to all the headings in the file after that point