Wiki basics

To add a wiki page, create a new page when you're on the main Wiki page.

This might sound obvious, but I had a moment just now when I realized that I couldn't find a number of the pages I'd just created. The problem is that I was assuming the + icon for creating a new page was universal; since I'd set up the site to be a wiki, I absent-mindedly assumed that any page would be in the wiki folder. The result: my pages were disappearing and tag links were broken. I'm noting this here because unfortunately this feels like the sort of mistake I might make again if my mind is somewhere else.

Note: Yellow's page creation is not infinitely hierarchical. If you're on a subpage of one of the main sections, and you create a page, it will also be a subpage of the main section you're in; it will not be a subpage of the subpage.

Takeaway: make sure all wiki pages are in the wiki folder.

Pitfalls

quote-plus-quote will mess everything up!

If you create a page with a plus sign wrapped in straight quotation marks, your host might think that is an SQL injection attack. What'll happen is that the edit will go through, and be displayed, but the next time you edit the page, you'll get a 500 Internal Server error and everything you wrote will be lost.

I learned this when I abruptly started getting 500 errors. Going over the logs, I saw references to a SQL injection attack, which didn't make sense since Yellow doesn't use SQL. It occurred to me out of the blue that maybe quote-plus-quote looked like a hostile query, so I removed it, and everything worked.

This might be specific to web hosts. I don't want to provide too much information about my setup, other than the fact that I use DreamHost, but if you encounter an inexplicable 500 right after editing a page, take a close look at anything wrapped in quotes.