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Socialtext Unplugged Introduction

Socialtext Unplugged allows you to work on your wiki while your computer is offline.

Socialtext Unplugged lets you "unplug" a set of wiki pages to your desktop or laptop computer. You can read and edit them on your computer, while you are not connected to the internet -- perhaps on an airplane or train or in a cafe with unreliable network access. Later, you can "sync" changes back to your wiki.

You can unplug recently changed pages in a wiki, a single page, or pages in a blog or tag group. Anywhere you see the blue Unplugged icon, you can unplug that set of pages. The unplug icon can be found on the dashboard of your wiki, at the bottom of every page, and at the top of lists of wiki pages such as what's new , tags, and the results of a search.

You will only see the Unplugged icon if unplugged has been enabled for your wiki by a wiki administrator. See Enabling and Disabling Unplugged

Below is a brief overview of the main features of Unplugged. If you would like to get started quickly, follow the Walkthrough to unplug recent changes.

Unplugging a page

You can unplug a single page by clicking the Unplugged icon at the bottom right corner of the page:

Unplugging a set of pages

To unplug the last 50 recently changed pages in a wiki, go to "What's New" and click the Unplugged icon. By default, unplugging "What's New" will give you the last 50 pages changed to work with on your hard drive while you're offline.

Unplugging more than 50 pages

Unplugging a large wiki may be very slow -- so slow that your browser will time out before you can unplug all the content. To avoid this problem, by default, if you click on the "unplug" icon on the dashboard of your wiki, you get the most recently changed 50 pages.

You work around the default by modifying the url to unplug the pages. You can change the number that appears in the url to increase or decrease the number of pages you get. For example, on a Mac, you can control-click on the Unplugged icon, copy the URL, paste it into the browser, and append ";count=100" to the url to get 100 pages instead of the default of 50. On a PC, right-click the Unplugged icon to copy the URL. For example, a url might look like this:

http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?action=unplug

and to modify it to unplug the last 100 pages, you would paste the following url into a browser window:

http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?action=unplug;count=100

You can find the total number of pages in a wiki by going to "What's New" and then "All Pages". The total number of pages is in parentheses in the top left hand corner of the page.

Working offline

Once you click the Unplugged icon, you can open the page or pages you have unplugged with your browser. Or you can save the unplugged pages to a convenient location on your computer, to be opened in a browser later. Either way of downloading the file will work, and will result in a saved file on your hard drive.

The screen you will work in should look like your normal browser window, containing something like this in the body of the page:

You may want to read through a few of the help files within Unplugged. The GettingStarted window has links to explanations of how to save changes, browse and edit, and sync changes. The Walkthrough to unplug recent changes is another good place to get started, and Unplugged's internal documentation contains more detail.

View page

Click on an underlined link to a page to view that page's content.

The page will open as a mini-window, or "tiddler", inside your main Unplugged browser window. Above each open mini-window is a toolbar with options like edit, save, and close.

Create page

Click on a word or phrase with a dotted underline to create and edit a new page, much as you would in a regular wiki page.

You can also create a page by clicking "New tiddler" in the right hand sidebar. Name your new page, create its text and click "done". When you sync, it will be added to the pages on your server.

Note: tags added while Unplugged will not sync to your server. You must add tags on the wiki directly, while you are online.

Edit page

Click "edit" in the top toolbar of a mini-window to edit the content of that window. In the edit window, the top right hand toolbar gives the option of "done", "cancel", or "delete".

Done

To save what you've typed in the edit and tagging windows, click "done" in the toolbar above that edit window.

Close

Clicking "close" on the toolbar above a mini-window will close that window. You can open it easily again from the list of pages in the sidebar. Clicking "close all others" in the toolbar of a mini-window will keep that mini-window open while hiding all others.

Save

Clicking "Save" in the "Backstage" toolbar at the very top of your Unplugged page will save all your changes to your hard drive. They won't be saved back to your server until you sync them.

Syncing pages will automatically save them to your hard drive.

You can click "Options" in the right hand sidebar and set the Autosave option to save changes to your hard drive every few minutes.

Syncing your pages back to the server

When you are ready to synchronize your unplugged pages back to the wiki on your server, click "sync" in the righthand sidebar.

A list of all the pages you have unplugged will appear. The pages you have changed will be highlighted in green, and will have the boxes next to them checked.

Click on the "sync" button at the bottom of the page, and your pages will synchronize with your wiki on the server.

The changed and sync-ed pages will now be highlighted in purple in the sync list view.

You can then click "close", up at the far right hand side of the page to close the sync window and return to the basic Unplugged interface, where you can continue editing and viewing pages.

If you sync pages without saving first, Unplugged will save the changed pages to your hard drive before syncing. You can also save them first on your hard drive, and then sync.

While you have been editing pages offline, some of those pages may also have been changed on the server. Unplugged will warn you of potential conflicts in editing, during the sync process.

If anyone else has changed a page on the server, you will get a warning and a choice to override those changes. The sync list will show the pages you have changed that also have been changed on the server highlighted in red, and the "Synchronization status" column for that page will indicate that it's been changed on the server.

If you write over changes someone else has made in your wiki, it's okay. Those changes won't be lost, and you can easily find them using the revision history. You can integrate and merge offline changes with online changes by clicking the "Revisions" option in the top right hand toolbar in your wiki. See Page revision history for a walkthrough of reverting to previous revisions as well as comparing and integrating two different revisions.

Enabling and disabling Unplugged

New wikis will be created with Unplugged turned on, by default. Existing wikis may or may not have Unplugged enabled.

To turn Unplugged on and off for a wiki, you must be a wiki administrator.

Click on "Settings" in the upper right hand toolbar of any wiki page.

Click on "Workspace Features" in the left hand sidebar. Near the bottom of the page, there are radio buttons to enable or disable Unplugged for a wiki.

Making this change will turn Unplugged on or off for all users of a wiki.

For server administrators

To turn off Unplugged for a wiki, your server administrator can use st-admin:

st-admin set-workspace-config --workspace workspacename enable_unplugged 0

And to turn it back on again by default, here is the command:

st-admin set-workspace-config --workspace workspacename enable_unplugged 1

Walkthrough to unplug recent changes

Here's a step-by-step Walkthrough to unplug recent changes. Unplug, save, change something, and sync the page back to your server.

Unplugged has many more capabilities and interesting features, which you can read about in the extra documentation that will come up on your browser when you unplug your wiki. However, following this basic walkthrough should be enough to get you started and working offline.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

Using Socialtext is simple.

You read, write, link and remember.

Read

When you work in Socialtext, you work on pages. A Socialtext workspace is simply a collection of these pages, connected together through links. This makes reading a workspace very similar to reading the Web.

Socialtext workspaces are collections of pages.

Write

Socialtext workspace, however, are very different from the Web in an important way. You can edit the full text of any page. In fact, that is the essence of how you work in Socialtext: by creating and editing pages.

Every page in a workspace is editable. Just click, type, and save!

Link

Unlike the web, every page has its own unique name in a Socialtext workspace. This makes linking between pages easy. Just write the name of the page. Finding pages is also easier. They are called just what you name them.

Every page has a name. Linking to a page is as simple as writing its name.

Remember

Socialtext remembers every thing you write here. Anything done here can be undone. With Socialtext, you can enjoy the freedom to play with ideas comforted that you will never lose that award winning idea.

Socialtext keeps every revision of each page. Never worry again about losing a good idea.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

Getting there

What's new gives you a snapshot of recent activity in the workspace. What's new can be accessed from the dashboard by clicking the What's new link or icon:

It can also be accessed through the navigation menu at the top of any page, as shown here:

When the Email Notification setting is turned on, workspace members periodically receive automatic notifications of what's new via email. See Email notification of recent changes.

Overview

What's new lists every change to all pages in the workspace. Each change lists

• the name of the page changed
• the person who changed it
• the date and time they changed it
• and the current revision.

By default, What's new lists entries in reverse chronological order. The most recent changes appear at the top, and the least recent at the bottom. However, you can re-sort the listing by any of the columns by clicking on the column's header.

Only the changes made in the last week are normally shown. You can see all pages in the workpace by clicking on the All Pages tab at the top.

Changes in another workspace

You can keep up with What's new in a different workspace by viewing a list of those changes in a page. All you have to do is write

just a list: {recent-changes <workspace>}
full contents: {recent-changes-full <workspace>}

where <workspace> is the name of the workspace to watch. If you omit <workspace>, the current workspace's changes will be displayed. For example, to see the changes in the Customer Exchange, write

just a list: {recent-changes exchange}
full contents: {recent-changes-full exchange}

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

A weblog is a format for displaying a set of pages, with the most recently changed content first. A weblog is useful for individuals and teams who want to keep regular journals of projects, research, and other ongoing activity.

Create a weblog. Select Settings, then "Create New Weblog". The name of a weblog must end with the word "blog" or "weblog", such as "Sample Weblog".

View a weblog. Click on "Weblogs" next to Quick jump. The weblog you last viewed will be shown. To view a different weblog, select one from the "Go to:" box on the right.

Add a weblog entry. While viewing the weblog, click the "New Post" button. This will add an entirely new entry at the top of the weblog.

You can also make an already existing page become part of a weblog. Just visit that page and add as a tag the name of the weblog where you want it to appear.

Edit a weblog entry. You can edit the text of any entry in the weblog by clicking the "edit this post" link at the bottom of each entry.

Comment on an entry. Click the "comment" link at the bottom of any entry.

Attach a file to an entry. Click on the "attachments" link at the bottom of any entry. See Attached files for more on the mechanics of attaching a file.

Weblog navigation. The Weblog sidebar contins Weblog Navigation, which is a notice board that lives in the top right-hand corner of your weblog. You can use this to describe the purpose of your weblog, provide links to other relevant weblogs, or display a message of the month. To edit it, click on the edit link.

Linking to a weblog.

From this workspace use {weblog: weblogname}
From another workspace use {weblog: workspacename; weblogname}

You can also do this in Simple mode with WikiWidgets, by selecting "Weblog link " and turning on "More options".

Linking to a weblog entry. As with other pages, you can use the title of an entry for linking to it. If you want to link from another website, in an email, etc, you can use the "permalink" that is at the bottom of the post. Click (or right-click) on permalink and then copy the address.

Printing a weblog. The small printer icon at the top of the weblog page allows you to print the weblog you are viewing.

Include a weblog inside a page. You can quickly build summaries of projects within your workspace by including each weblog directly into a single page. In Advanced Mode, you can use the following commands:

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

A Watchlist allows you to keep a close watch on a page or group of pages. The Watchlist lets you know when the pages you are interested in have been updated. You can subscribe to updates to your watchlist by email or by RSS.

Adding and removing pages

To add a page to your watchlist, click the star that appears in the top-right corner:

The star will turn blue:

To remove the page you are viewing from your watchlist, simply click the star again.

Seeing Watchlist updates in your workspace

Your Watchlist is accessed via the dashboard by clicking "Your Watchlist".

The Watchlist page lists every change to all pages you have added to your Watchlist, with the most recently changed pages first. However, you can re-sort the listing by any of the columns by clicking on the column's header.

Each change lists

• the title of the page that was changed;
• the person who changed it;
• the date and time they changed it;
• and the current number of revisions.

You can also remove pages from your watchlist by clicking the blue star next to each entry in the Watchlist page. (Note that this does not actually delete those pages.) From the same list, click on the white star to re-add the page to your Watchlist.

Getting Watchlist updates by email or RSS

You can keep aware of activity on the pages in your Watchlist without actually visiting the workspace, using either email or RSS.

Email notifications

The system will send you notifications of pages that have recently changed via email. The Watchlist item under Settings / Preferences allows you to set how frequently these emails will be sent out and what is put in them.

RSS

When you visit your Watchlist page, the RSS button links to an RSS feed for the watchlist, which you can use to subscribe your aggregator to updates.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

View What's New

To unplug a set of your most recently changed pages, click What's new in the top left of the toolbar. This should show you a list of recently changed pages.

Note: By default, What's new is set to show changes made in the last week. If you like, you can change the default setting using configure settings to show changes made in the last day, month, or other time period, depending on the level of activity in your wiki.

For example, to change the settings for What's New to cover changes made in the last month, click on Settings in the upper right hand toolbar of your wiki. Then click on "What's New" in the left hand sidebar. Change the pulldown menu for the What's New time interval to one month. Then, click the Save button at the top of the page.

Unplug the set of pages

Now that you've changed the settings to reflect changes made over the last month, you are ready to unplug a set of pages.

Click on "What's new" in the top toolbar of your workspace. This will show you a list of recently changed pages.

Click the Unplugged icon. A dialog box will pop up offering to open or save an html file.

Save the unplugged set of pages

You can now do one of two things. One choice is to save the set of pages to your hard drive and then click or drag it to open it in a web browser. Or, you can choose to open the html file with a web browser, directly from the dialog box.

Either way, the set of pages is now offline, and you can use your web browser offline to read them and to make changes.

Navigate to your pages

Your set of pages will now open in a browser window.

You can navigate to start reading and editing the pages you unplugged by clicking on page titles in the right hand sidebar.

When you click on a link to one of your pages, a mini-window called a "tiddler" will open in your main browser window. You can open many of these mini windows within one main browser window.

Make changes

Edit a page or pages. To save your changes, click "done" in the navigation bar at the top of the editing window when you are done.

Note that tagging is not enabled in this current version of Socialtext Unplugged. Tags will not be synced to the server. If you would like to tag your wiki pages, you must tag them on the wiki, on your server, while you are online.

Sync the pages

Click "sync" in the right hand sidebar.

This will bring you to a browser window that lists your unplugged pages. The pages you've changed will be highlighted in

• red if there has been a change on the server
• green if you have made changes and there's no change on the server
• purple once you make the sync and changes are uploaded to the server

Then click the "sync" button at the bottom of the browser window.

A sync of your Unplugged pages will replace changes made on the server. Any changes made to a page on the server will still be in the revision history for that page on the server.

Stop using Unplugged

You can close the editing window at any time. The pages you've unplugged will still be on your hard drive unless you delete them.

The Home link is always found at the top left of the screen:

In a private workspace, clicking Home leads you to the Dashboard by default. A workspace administrator may change it so that clicking Home leads to the workspace central page instead.

In a public workspace, clicking Home takes you to the workspace central page.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

Navigating

In Socialtext, tags help you identify information so it can be found later on. Every page can have any number of tags.

View tags for a page. When viewing a page, its tags are listed in the light green "Tags" box in the sidebar. If you can't see the sidebar, click > in the upper right corner of the page to open the sidebar.

View all tags. Visit the Dashboard and click All tags to see all the tags in the workspace. You will see an alphabetical list of all of the defined tags. Clicking on any tag will show a list of all pages with that tag.

Editing Tags

When you are browsing a page, you can edit the tags directly in the light green Tags box.

Assign a tag. Click the Add tag button to add a tag. A box will appear that lets you enter a tag.

Suggestions are provided below the box, based on the characters you have typed so far and the tags that already exist in the workspace. Clicking a suggested tag will add that tag. To save your newly entered tag, press Enter or click the Save tag button.

Remove a tag. Click the [x] next to a tag to remove it from the page.

NOTE: All workspace weblog names are also tag names. Assigning a weblog as a tag (e.g. assigning the tag My Weblog) publishes the page to that weblog.

Advanced formatting: Including tags in pages

Within Advanced mode, you can refer to tags within your pages, in effect, linking to a tag.

• From this workspace, use {category: tagname}
• From another workspace, use {category: <workspacename> tagname}

You can also list the most recently updated pages with a given tag directly inside your pages.

It is easiest to link to tags and include tags by using WikiWidgets in Simple mode.

10 Recent changes in pages with a given tag

10 Recent changes in pages with a given tag, full - include page contents

Complete tag listing

Complete tag listing, full - include page contents

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

You can add a table of contents to a page in a workspace. The table of contents is based on the hierarchy of headings and subheadings in the workspaces.

Table of contents for the current page

You can generate a table of contents for the current page:

{toc}

You can also do this in Simple mode with WikiWidgets.

Another page in this workspace

You can also generate a table of contents for another page in the same workspace:

{toc [Help for Workspace Administrators]} 

You can also do this in Simple mode with WikiWidgets, by selecting "Make Table of Contents" and turning on "More options".

A page in another workspace

You can generate a table of contents for a page in a different workspace. If the reader does not have permission to view that workspace, they will not be able to navigate the links.

{toc exchange [Socialtext Customer Exchange]}

You can also do this in Simple mode with WikiWidgets, by selecting "Make Table of Contents" and turning on "More options".

Back to Socialtext Documentation.

This is an index of the help topics available.

• For new users, start here for a tour of Socialtext.
• For workspace administrators, see also Help for Workspace Administrators.
• For changes in this version, see Release Notes for Socialtext 2.12 - WikiWidgets. The immediately previous Release Notes for Socialtext 2.11 - Export to Word and PDF are also available.

For additional support, send an email to customer support to support@socialtext.com. Feel free to send feedback or report bugs. You can also ask questions in the Socialtext Customer Exchange.

Help Table of Contents

• Log in
• Logging in
• Remember me on this computer
• I don't know my password
• Logging out
• Change password
• Reading the workspace
• Browsing
• Keeping up to date
• List all pages
• Watching selected pages
• Searching
• Print a page
• Save a page
• Export multiple pages to PDF or Word
• Searching
• Advanced searching
• Search by phrase
• Search by title
• Search by category
• Search with wildcards.
• Exclude a term
• Combining search terms
• Stemming
• Advanced formatting: Including a search inside a page
• Keyword search
• keyword search, full - include page contents
• Title search
• Title search, full - include page contents
• Changing the workspace
• Editing a page
• Add a comment
• Create a new page
• Rename a page
• Delete a page
• Duplicate a page
• Copy a page to another workspace
• Attach a file
• Editing
• How to start?
• How does it work?
• Writing pages is easy!
• Page contention
• Edit modes
• Simple mode
• Advanced mode
• Simple mode
• Toolbar
• Linking
• Insert WikiWidgets
• WikiWidget Catalog
• Adding a link to another workspace
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Copying and Pasting from Web Pages or Microsoft Word
• Preview Mode
• Simple Mode: A Work In Progress
• Wikiwyg (Simple Editing) Open Source Project
• Advanced mode
• What's with the funny punctuation?
• Toolbar
• Edit tips
• Advanced formatting
• Advanced formatting
• Linking
• Pre-formatted text
• Tables
• Attached files
• Attach a file (while viewing a page; while editing)
• Remove a file
• Including an image in the page
• Attaching several files
• View all workspace attachments
• Link to an attachment
• Linking
• Page link
• Dashed links
• Link text
• Links to other workspaces
• Links to sections inside pages
• Naming a section on a page
• External links
• External link text
• Table of Contents
• Table of contents for the current page
• Another page in this workspace
• A page in another workspace
• Include Page
• Include a page from this workspace
• Include a page from another workspace
• Include inside a dashboard table
• Page revision history
• See previous revisions
• Compare revisions
• Restore a previous revision
• What's new
• Getting there
• Overview
• Changes in another workspace
• Watchlist
• Adding or removing a page to your watchlist
• Seeing Watchlist updates in your workspace
• Getting Watchlist updates by email or RSS
• Weblogs
• Create a weblog
• View a weblog
• Add a weblog entry
• Edit a weblog entry
• Comment on an entry
• Attach a file to an entry
• Weblog navigation
• Linking to a weblog
• Linking to a weblog entry
• Printing a weblog
• Include a weblog inside a page
• Tags
• Navigating
• Editing Tags
• Assign a tag
• Remove a tag
• Advanced formatting: Including tagged pages in other pages
• Link to a tag
• 10 Recent changes with a given tag
• 10 Recent changes with a given tag, full - include page contents
• Complete tag listing
• Complete tag listing, full - include page contents
• Email
• Email a page
• Email to a workspace
• Send an email message with a tag
• Post an email message to a weblog
• Editing by email
• Recent changes by email
• Turn on email notification
• Turn off email notification
• Turn off email notification for everyone
• Connections
• Instant Messaging and Presence
• AIM, Yahoo!, Skype, Convoq ASAP
• Google
• Web feeds (RSS, Atom): in and out
• Subscribe to a Socialtext feed
• Password protection
• Importing RSS feeds into Socialtext
• Technorati
• Technorati search
• Weblog pings
• Tag links
• Working offline with Unplugged
• Unplug pages from your wiki to work offline
• Sync pages back to your online wiki
• Walkthrough to unplug recent changes
• RSS Tutorial
• What is RSS?
• Why use RSS with Socialtext?
• Why else use RSS?
• How to use RSS
• How to subscribe to Socialtext RSS feeds
• RSS password protection
• Instructions for secure newsfeed authentication
• NewsGator
• SharpReader
• URL Authentication (NOT RECOMMENDED)
• Configure settings

• Public workspaces
• How do I log in?
• How to create a public workspace
• Types of public workspaces
• Publish documents
• Group collaboration
• Run an event with Socialtext Eventspaces
• Membership by invitation
• Advanced features
• Reports
• Usage reports
• Sidebar
• Toggling the sidebar
• Tags
• Incoming links
• Attachments
• What's New
• Recently Viewed
• Socialtext Style Customization Guide
• Customize the look and feel of your workspace
• Authentication, Authorization, and Access Control in Socialtext
• Create workspaces with customized access control using Roles and Permission Sets