In Tutorial 2a: Activating a ship in an index page, you learned how to activate a ship and turn its name into an active page link. Now you need to create the page that the link points to. Here's how to do it.
For this part of the tutorial, you will need to copy and paste a template. To find the template, first go to the How To Edit Pages page. You will find a link to this page in the left hand navigation bar. Right-click on the link and open the page in a new window or tab so that you can access it without losing your place in the Tutorial.
<< Image showing the link to the "How To Edit Pages" page
On the "How To Edit Pages" page, scroll down until you see the section called "Templates to use when creating new pages in the Museum". Within this section is a link called Ship Page. Click this link to display the "Ship Page Template" page.
<< Image showing the link to the "Ship Page Template" page
<< Image showing the "Ship Page Template" page
We will not do anything with this page just yet; we just need to have it ready.
Now we need to display the Test Ship Index Page. Right click on the link and open it in a new window or tab.
Click on the name of the ship you activated in Part 1. For the Tutorial, we used SHIP2.
<< Image showing the link for the "SHIP2 DD 2" main page
The page for SHIP2 DD 2 will appear - but in Edit mode. You will see a big text box in the middle of the page. This is where the page code will go.
<< Image showing the "SHIP2 DD 2" main page in Edit mode
Switch to the browser window that contains the Ship Page Template page. You will see a large section in the middle with a light gray background and a border of small blue dashes. You need to copy all the text inside this entire section using your normal Copy/Paste technique (ie, highlight all the text with the mouse and then either hit the Control-C key, or right-click in the highlighted text and select Copy in the pop-up menu, or go to the menu bar and select Edit and then Copy).
Make sure you get them all.
Dont worry about what all the lines mean. You will only have to deal with a small portion of it. The rest will be left as-is.
<< Image showing the template lines highlighted
Back on the "SHIP2 DD 2" page, click inside the text box in the middle of the page and then Paste the lines you copied from the template (ie, either hit the Control-V key, or right-click in the highlighted text and select Paste in the pop-up menu, or go to the menu bar and select Edit and then Paste).
<< Image showing the text pasted into the text box of the "SHIP2 DD 2" page
You do not need to make any changes to the text at this time. Go to the very bottom of the page and find the "Save page" and "Show preview" buttons. Click the "Show preview" button to see what the page looks like in Preview mode.
<< Image showing the "SHIP2 DD 2" page in Preview mode
If everything looks reasonable, go ahead and click the "Save page" button.
<< Image showing the saved "SHIP2 DD 2" page
Congratulations! You have now created the ship's main page in its simplest form and have completed the minimum steps for activating a ship. You could stop now or take a break and come back later. Naturally, to do anything interesting from the ship's page requires a bit more work.
Notice that there are four primary sections to a ship's main page. A tutorial is provided for each section.
Ship Name and Designation History
This section lists the various names and designations assigned to the ship during its lifetime. The list should be in chronological order with the oldest values at the top. You don't need to do anything with this section unless you have the information.
