Tutorial 1b: An introduction to page links

A page link in the Museum is essentially the same as a link in any other web page. You click on it and then that page is automatically displayed in the browser window.
 
When editing a page in the Museum, you can add a link to another page that has some relevance to the current page. One example might be that you added a cover to the covers page for a specific ship and you also want to add a link to the page for the cachet maker. Another example might be that you want to update the "Other Information" section of a ship's main page with a link to the ship's page in the "Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships" web site.
 
Note that this tutorial does not have a hands-on exercise but you will need to know this information for some of the other tutorials.
 
Internal Page Links
 
The page link to a page inside the Museum has the following format:

[[PAGE_NAME | LABEL]]

Where:

PAGE_NAME is the name of the page and LABEL is the text that will appear in the link. Note that PAGE_NAME is only the name of the page - it is NOT a URL (ie, it is not http://www.xxxxxxx).

For example, the page link at the bottom of this page that takes you back to the Tutorials Main Page looks like this:

Return to [[Tutorials_Main_Page | Tutorials Main Page]]

The name of the Tutorials Main Page is "Tutorials_Main_Page" (notice the underscores) but it shows up as "Tutorials Main Page" (notice no underscores) because that is the label we assigned to it in the page link. The label does not have to use the same words as the page name - we could have set the label to "Main Page for the Museum Tutorials" if we wanted to.
 
If you wish, you can omit the label entirely. In this case, the label defaults to look exactly like the page name. Make sure to also omit the vertical bar that separates the page name and label sections.

Return to [[Tutorials_Main_Page]]

The real key here is that you have to know the name of the page you want to link to. There are two easy ways to get this information. In both cases, you must first go to that page. Once there, you will find the page name in two places:
 

1. In the browser address bar (usually at the top of the browser) you will see something like
   

   http://www.navalcovermuseum.org/wiki/index.php?title=Tutorials_Main_Page

   Everything after the title= is the name of the page being displayed. In this case, it is "Tutorials_Main_Page".
    
   
2. At the top of the page you always see the page's title. For example, the top line of text in the Tutorials Main Page is "Tutorials Main Page". Just change the blanks to underscores and you have the page name ("Tutorials_Main_Page").

Be careful to exactly match the page name when creating a link to it. Uppercase / lowercase is important as well as punctuation.
 
External Page Links
 
Page links to web pages outside the Museum are easier. They have the following format:

[PAGE_NAME LABEL]

Notice the difference between this format of page link and the format for internal page links. The external page link is enclosed by a single set of square brackets ("[...]") instead of a double set of square brackets ("[[...]]"). Also, there is no vertical bar separating the page link and label sections.
 
For example, a page link to the Universal Ship Cancellation Society home page would look like this in the page code:

[http://www.uscs.org Universal Ship Cancellation Society]

and look like this when the page is displayed in the browser:

Universal Ship Cancellation Society

Notice the little icon at the end of the external link - an arrow pointing outward from a square base. This indicates that the page link will cause you to leave the Museum and go to an external page.

 

Return to Tutorials Main Page

 

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