Help:Portal

This is the help page for building and maintaining portals.

Creating a new portal

There are a number of ready-made templates, the latest of which is this one: Template:Box portal skeleton 2. To use this template, create your new page and type in (or better, copy and paste in):

{{subst:Box portal skeleton 2}}

The remainder of this help page assumes you are using Template:Box portal skeleton 2.

What goes in a portal?

It is important to realise that portals can overlap with each other. A portal does not have an exclusive claim over its content. A portal primarily serves as an access aid or navigation aid, helping specific kinds of user find the content they are interested in.

Example: there are portals for both primary education and secondary education. However the age boundary between primary and secondary is anything but clear. If a child has 10 years of compulsory schooling, then usually the first four will be primary and the last four secondary, and the middle two will vary from one jurisdiction or schooling area to another. On top of that, certain topics may be common to both levels, such as some issues of teaching methodology.

Overlapping is therefore necessary and desirable, but this does not mean that a merger should take place.

This is different from real-world universities and institutions, where territory is valuable and claims to exclusivity are often made by superordinate bodies. In the real world, joint ventures between levels of educational administration are more the exception than the norm.

Updating featured content

Suggested formats for featured content are:

A list of page links.
A manually edited feature with page link, image and a paragraph of description.
A dynamically rotating feature (as Wikimedia projects typically have on the main page). Contact a custodian if you'd like to find out how to make one of these, or have one made for you.

Updating the category system

You'l' see that the category system ("guide to..." box) does not have an edit link. That's because you can't edit the category tree directly. The tree is a dynamic record of the current structure of the category system linked to the portal. The only way to change it is to edit the categories themselves.

To move (or remove) any item, click on its page in the category tree, then edit the page's categories (and perhaps their parent categories). See: Help:Category.
To add a page, edit the page in question and add a suitable category to it - either the category tree's parent category, or one of its sub-categories. See: Help:Category.

Adding more boxes

If you look at the source code of the portal, you should see that it is fairly easy to add more boxes. Generally you should know how wiki tables work and be able to recognise complex templates well enough to know what to leave alone and what to change!

Copy the code for a box and paste it in at the bottom of the table column.
Change the title of the box. It can be hyperlinked with wiki syntax if required.
Choose an icon and enter the name of the icon where it says.
The content page for the content of the box must be specified, and you do this by changing the subpage name - in two places - once for the main inclusion, and once for the edit link.

If you need help with this, ask a custodian.