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Intro to articles
This public article was written by Admin Sheep, and last updated on 7 Apr 2015, 10:41.

[comments] Menu 1. The article interface 2. Language summary articles 3. Lesson articles Articles are a great way to tell us more detailed stuff about your languages; why, this page you are viewing now is an article! You can write anything from a description of the country or species that speak your language, to complex phonologies, or number systems; the possibilities are endless. But how does one write an article?

[top]The article interface

The article interface is quite simple really. There are a number of fields and options which we will explain here.

Article name
This is a name for your article. Pick anything you like that gives a very brief overview of what your article is about. For example if you are writing about verb conjugations in Languagish, you could call the article 'Languagish Verbs'. Some people also use bilingual article names; in English, and the conlang. The article name is what will appear in the list of articles on your language summary page, and the main articles list.

The folder is where you would like to place the article within your organisational hierarchy. This can be changed at any point, so don't fret if you change your mind later.

This is additional information to give the reader an idea about what an article is about that wouldn't fit into the article name. This will also appear on the language summary list, and the main articles list. Note that if it is too long, the content of the summary may be truncated to fit properly into the lists, so have a play to see what fits best.

There are two options here; private and public. A private article is only viewable by yourself and on some occasions staff (for example for troubleshooting or maintenance). The private articles will not show up in the main articles list, but you can find it still through your journal.

Article content
This is where the main stuff happens. At the time of writing this, the content can be anywhere up to 25,000 characters long (although this may change without warning). You can use all the normal CWS markup tags (see this article for help with that), as well as a few special ones which are displayed below the subject tags field. The special tags do various things like mark an article as a Work in Progress, or suppress the automatic menu that is created.

Subject tags
These are tags you can give your article to list it by topic. Tags are searchable form the main articles list and help other people find information faster. For example, if your article is about verb conjugations, you might tag this with verbs and conjugation. Tagging an article with your language's three-letter code also allows the article to display on the language summary page for that language.

Each tag is separated by a space, and if the tag you want to use has two words (such as 'noun classes'), you can use an underscore to show that it is treated as one tag. For example, your tags might be: "nxs noun_classes nouns genders articles".

[top]Language summary articles

As articles are often about specific languages, it is handy to have those articles displayed on your language summary page. However, CWS does not know what articles are about what language unless you tell it. The way we do this is through the use of the subject tags. As mentioned earlier, if you want to add an article to a language summary page, you just need to add that language's three-letter code (preferably in lower case) to the article's subject tags.

For example, an article with the tags "nxs noun_classes nouns genders articles" will appear on the summary page for  Nithalos, as it's language code is nxs, and nxs is listed in the subject tags.

[top]Lesson articles

If you are the person who is inclined to write lessons for your language, there is a special way of telling CWS that an article is a lessons article so that it is displayed differently on the language summary page.

In order to do this, you need three specific tags added to the subject tags field. These are:
XXX - your three-letter language code (such as nxs for  Nithalos)
lessons - tells CWS it is a lesson article
lesson_x - where x is the number in the order.

There is a 'New Lesson' button on the main articles list page that will pre-fill the subject tags for you so that you do not have to do this yourself. When you click the 'New Lesson' button, a prompt is shown to ask you what lesson number you are wanting to create. This is so that we can use the correct tags for your article. These are editable once you've created your article, so don't fret if you use the wrong number.

Two examples of what this looks like can be found here and here.
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