The Trac Wiki Engine

Trac has a built-in wiki engine, used for text and documentation throughout the system. WikiFormatting is used in wiki pages, tickets, check-in log messages, milestone and report descriptions. It allows for formatted text and hyperlinks in and between all Trac modules.

Editing wiki text is easy, using any web browser and a simple formatting system, rather than more complex markup languages like HTML. The reasoning behind its design is that HTML, with its large collection of nestable tags, is too complicated to allow fast-paced editing, and distracts from the actual content of the pages. Note though that Trac also supports HTML, reStructuredText and  Textile as alternative markup formats.

The main goal of the wiki is to make editing text easier and encourage people to contribute and annotate text content for a project. Trac also provides a simple toolbar to make formatting text even easier.

The wiki itself does not enforce any structure, but rather resembles a stack of empty sheets of paper, where you can organize information and documentation as you see fit, and later reorganize if necessary. As contributing to a wiki is essentially building an hypertext, general advice regarding HTML authoring apply here as well. For example, the  Style Guide for online hypertext explains how to think about the  overall structure of a work and how to organize information  within each document. One of the most important is “make your HTML page such that you can read it even if you don't follow any links.”

Learn more about:

• WikiNewPage creation, which can be configured to start from a page template
• WikiFormatting rules, including advanced topics like WikiMacros and WikiProcessors
• How to use WikiPageNames and other forms of TracLinks which are used to refer in a precise way to any resource within Trac

If you want to practice editing, please use the SandBox.

Before saving your changes, you can Preview the page or Review the Changes you've made. You can get an automatic preview of the formatting as you type when you activate the Edit Side-by-side mode. There is a configurable delay between when you make your edit and when the automatic preview will update.

Some more information about wikis on the web:

• A definition of  Wiki, in a famous wiki encyclopedia
• The  History of the original wiki
• A wiki page explaining  why wiki works

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See also: TracGuide