About this website

As the home page says, this website contains a bunch of historical information about how HiP house was and current information about HiP house runs today. However, it's not just a static resource that one person is in charge of. In the spirit of cooperative living, all HiP members have the ability to edit, create, and contribute to pages on this website! Think of this website like a HiP-focused Wikipedia.

What that means is that this website is a living, communal resource. The hope is that all y'all HiP members will feel comfortable contributing to and building this resource, and that it'll become a digital space that we can all shape and share together!! Maybe we could continue a tradition from a previous incarnation of the HiP website and have a bunch of information about gardening! Maybe we could have easy-to-read summary pages around governance: how to propose a motion, how to run council, etc. We collectively have the capacity to shape this resource how we want to!

This page in particular serves as part tutorial and part style guide for how to contribute to the HiP House website.

If you'd like to edit a page, you can click the “Page” button at the top right, then click “Edit this page.” Once you do so, you'll be dropped into the page editing screen.

The software we're using to run this website, called DokuWiki, has documentation on how to edit a page. For now, we'll provide a brief summary:

• Our setup has two editors available: a “basic” editor that's similar to Notion or Microsoft Word, and a more “advanced” editor where formatting is done using special characters (e.g., double asterisks for bold). You can switch between these two modes using the “Toggle syntax ↔ visual editor” button. The advanced editor is shown by default.
• If you're using the advanced mode, the syntax for how to do formatting is explained on this page: syntax
• In either editor mode, there are buttons at the top of the editing window that will let you do formatting, such as bolding text and inserting a heading, and insert links and images.
• Feel free to be liberal with links! You can also link to pages you haven't created yet, then create those pages after (or not at all).

When naming a page, keep the following guidelines in mind:

• Folders. Pages can be placed in folders (the software we're using to host this website calls them namespaces). To place a page in a folder, prepend the folder name followed by a colon, for example: internal:garden. Folders can be nested, e.g., internal:wrm:trash. Use existing folders where possible and create new folders where reasonable and necessary.
• Keep it short. When naming your page, try to keep the name of the page short. For instance, the name of the mailing list page is mailing, instead of mailinglistpage. If you do need to do a multi-word page name, keep the entire page name in lowercase and put the words one after another, not separated by dashes or underscores or spaces.

If you look to your left, you'll notice that there's a sidebar that's attached along every page. This sidebar is just another wiki page: sidebar. Additionally, you can also create different sidebars for different folders. So for instance, the page internal:sidebar would be the sidebar that is shown for pages in the “internal” folder. If you edit these pages, it'll change what shows up in the relevant sidebar.

When adding links to the sidebar, be strategic but sparing. Sidebar space is limited, so link to the pages that people will most likely need to reference the most, and for lesser-used resources, you can link to those from the initial page. For instance, if there were pages around how to do different workshifts, you could link to the main index of all workshifts in the sidebar, and then only in that page you could link out to info about each workshift.

Along with editing existing pages, you can also create new pages! You can do this one of three ways:

1. Click “Page” at the top right, then “New page”
2. Create a link to a new page in an existing page, then click through it from the existing page
3. Go to the URL https://hip.coop/doku.php?id=<page name> in your browser, where <page name> is the name of the new page you want to make.

The HiP web presence has gone through a few prior incarnations, including:

• a Google Site and
• a old HiP wiki (which this website takes inspo from)

For more info on the history of HiP, check our our history page!