How to make a wiki

DEVONthink Tips
1

I keep meaning to make use of this feature, but am lost.
I understand the principles of wikis’, but could do with a tutorial to show what the few posts I have found about them means.

Thanks.

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Perhaps you could link to those “few posts” so other readers would be able to follow along?

I assume you’re looking for information on using DEVONthink’s “wiki” features? There are far more complex wiki products available, such as VoodooPad, ConnectedText or MediaWiki – but you can find all that info on the web.

In DEVONthink, the wiki features are simple. Text in plain text or rich text documents (and, with a bit more work, Formatted text documents) can make links to other documents. There are two ways to do this:

  1. If you type the name of an existing document, the text you typed becomes clickable – opening the other document
  2. If you want to make link to a new document, type the text that you want to become the name of that new document, select it, and choose Format > Make Link or shift-command-M. The selected text will now appear as a link, and as soon as you click that link a new document with that name will be created in the current group. If you have defined a “template” in Preferences > Editing then that new document’s contents will conform to the template.

Here are the preferences

You’ll notice you have a choice for WikiLinks –

  • “Mashed” words are WordsLikeThis.
  • “Aliases” can be assigned to any document in DEVONthink in the Tools > Show Info panel. A document can have as many aliases as you want – just separate them by commas when you define them in Show Info. Instead of typing a document name to make a link, type one of its aliases and the link will be made
  • “Names” means “document names”
  • Look at the Documentation section of Help and you’ll find a list of all the placeholders (the part of the template set off in “%” marks) that can be used in templates. You can also have a blank template, if that suits you.

These are the basic facts for making wikis in DEVONthink.

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Thanks edgley for posting this question and thanks Korm for your explanation, I have never looked at Wikis but I will certainly begin to use them now!

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All I did was a search using the term wiki and read what came up.
However, all assumed a higher level of basic knowledge I (thought then) didn’t have.

Thank you for your post, it seems I did get the just of it. Must just have been something else that didn’t work when I typed the name of an existing document.

Sure, there are other wiki programmes; am just trying to keep my life in DT, Omnifocus, Ulysses and Curio; tits, have to add a money programme next, think it will be Moneywiz.

5

I’m reviving this old thread because I have a question about the process of making a file. I can only get the Format -> Make Link (Shift + CMD + M) feature to work when I am using rich text files. As all of my files are in plain text, and I wonder if there is a way to produce a template without relying on rich text. Thanks!

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Plain text supports only automatic Wiki linking (see Preferences > Editing).

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Thanks. That is, by the way, a wonderful feature, and greatly appreciated. Ideally, I was hoping to have some sort of way to quickly make and edit a template in plain text, but it looks like that isn’t possible in DT, so I may have to use a text expander. No big deal, but the fewer hoops to jump through, the better.

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[quote=“FROBGOBLIN”]
was hoping to have some sort of way to quickly make and edit a template in plain text/quote]
Not sure what “make and edit a template” is in this context, but any document can be “made into a template” with File > Export > As Template

(Edit: though today there’s a bug in the command – I’ll report it separately.)

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True… I’ll look into it. I want to make notes as quickly as possible with as much as possible pre-populated. For example, a note like this:

TITLE: 20150113_READING_note
DATE: 2015-01-13T00:20
KEYWORDS:

SUMMARY

I’d been so focused on trying to get this shift + command + m thing to work with the preferences I defined (a one-step solution with a keyboard shortcut!) that I didn’t even consider exporting as a template. Maybe, when the bug is fixed, I’ll give it a try.

10

Thank you for those useful info. you gave.

Here are my questions, hope someone could give me some info. to grasp the usage of wikilink.

If I put the two different documents into the same aliases, when I wrote this aliases in another text-document, such as a MarkDown-file, I found it’s linked to the later documents I putted the aliases, is this situation the same as yours?

The wiklink supports a documents links to another one, this connection seems is one-way. Is it possible to build the bidirectional link in Devonthink?

Maybe I miss some advanced functions in wikilink, if so, please help me learn more about it.

Thank you all!

11

I believe that one or more persons here wrote script(s) for that. E.g. Experimental: Script to trace a backlink
“backlink” might be a helpful term to use in the forum search.

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