Help for Authors
As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.
understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.
Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.
Getting Started
If you are going to edit an existing page, the first thing to do is to find it in the menu system, view it, and click on Edit.
If you want to create a new page you have a couple of decisions to make first:
- Is it for internal or external use?
- What type of page will it be? The quick answer is 'Make it a Story'. The longer answer is 'Use Book to start a new major menu item like Pending Content'; don't use Page; use Minimal if you want a minimal surround; use Blog for a blog entry; use biblio for a bibliographic entry; and in all other cases use 'Story'.
'Page' is reserved for public pages more to do with the website itself. Pages such as Help, About, Contacts, Privacy Policy etc. We may occasionally need to write code to handle this kind of page slightly differently.
Making an Internal Page
Click on Internal Documents and use the book navigation links to find a page that will be the parent of your new page. This is a bit like finding the folder where you will save a new file. Once there, click on 'Add Child Page' to get to the new page submission form. At the end of the form you'll find Preview and Submit buttons. Preview makes no permanent changes to the web site, so don't forget to finish off with the Submit button.
Making a Public Page
(or a page that will become a public page eventually)
Click on Create Content to expand the submenu and choose your page type. Make the new page a Story. Use the Outline tab or the Parent drop-down menu to insert the page somewhere in the Pending Content tree.
Linking a Page into the Menus
There are currently 3 top-level books which appear in the right hand menu. These are Featured Content (the public book), Pending Content (visible to admins, author/editors, and reviewers) and Internal Documents (visible to admins and author/editors). You can move items between these books by changing the item's parent in edit mode. If the Edit page does not show a parent drop down menu, then look for one in the Outline tab.
Publishing a Page
A page is published if:
- There is a publicly visible link to it. i.e. you can navigate to it from either one of the top menu bar buttons or from the Featured Content menu.
- It's Workflow state is Public
- It's Publishing Options state is 'Published'. (It is set to 'Published' by default.)
To make a section of Pending Content public, you need to:
- Either change its parent to Featured Content (or something inside Featured Content), or you might just link to that section from the menu bar (or something accessible from the menu bar).
- Navigate to each newly public page and ensure that each page has its Workflow set to Public.
Defining the teaser
Use the 
teaser break button to define where to place a break between teaser text and remaining text. Text and images before the teaser mark appear whenever the page appears in a list. Examples of lists are the home page, search results and category lists.
Image Preparation
Best to prepare your image as a png file of width no more than 500 pixels. For left and right embedded images where text will flow around the image, use a width of 250px.
Use Gimp or some other image manipulation program to reduce the image if needed. (Image > Scale Image - making sure you are in RGB mode first - see Image > Image Mode).
Plain Image Insertion
You should find what you need by clicking on 
- the leftmost picture button of the editor button bar. Click this Insert Image button, click browse to upload a new file, click 'add' (on the right of image browser dialog), and complete the rest of the form.
You can upload pictures up to 100Kbytes in size. If it's bigger than that use a graphics program to convert it to a sensible file format. PNG is optimal. JPEG and GIF are also supported. The alternate text is required by the visually impaired who may access the site using a screen reader. Google finds it handy too.
Captioned Image Insertion
Press one of the 'Centre Image', 'LH cap img', or 'RH cap img' buttons roughly at the point in the text you are illustrating. Insert the image using the dialog box, and then replace the word 'Caption' with the desired caption.
Clearing to a newline
Text written immediately after a (small) image will normally appear alongside the image. If you really want a piece of text to appear under the image, then position the cursor before the text and press the 
'Clear to New Line' button. This is very handy if your image is quite wide and so text appears alongside in lines that are too short.
If the result causes too much white space, replace '<br...' with '<div...' in the inserted html.
Making Hyperlinks
Select the text you are linking from and click on the 
world+link button in the button bar. The Title field can be used to give the reader some help when hovering over the hyperlink. It's safest to copy/paste hyperlinks rather than typing them as typos will lead to dangling links. Test hyperlinks to check that they do what you want after making them. All pages on this site have a node number which you can see in the browser address bar. So, to link to this help page you would link to the url '/node/26', making it a 'local' link. You may also categorise links as external, level 1, 2 3 or 4 as appropriate.
Making Hyperlinks within a page
First you must label the place within the page that you want to link to using <a id="aLabel"></a>. Then refer to that label by appending #aLabel to the page URL. For example this link will reopen this page at the paragraph you are reading now by linking to the url '/node/26#InternalLinks'.
Inserting Headings
Use h2 for section, h3 for subsection, and h4 for subsubsection.
Avoid use of B (<strong>) for headings.
Inserting inline emphasis
Use I.
Inserting quotations
Insert the text, select it, and press 'Q'.
"What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! "
Hamlet (Act II, Sc. II).
Inserting Flash Animations
Upload the swf file with thet File Attachment block in the editor. Make a note of the uploaded URL displayed in the File Attachments panel as it may have had a number appended to it. In the body edit panel, type some alternate text which will be displayed if the browser does not have the Flash Player installed. See existing examples for text that directs the user to download and install the player. Select this alternate text and press the 'Flash' button. Fill in the URL of the flash file - /files/something.swf - its width should be 100% and its height should be something like 400px, and submit. You can also use the browse button to add the swf URL, but not yet to upload the swf itself.
Changing the behaviour of a Flash Animation
All animations can take parameters. Some can take custom variables too which depend on the animation code.
See The Survival Animation in edit mode for an example of both.
Inserting Tables
You'll need to use Full HTML input format with the <table><tr><td> tags. Ask if you need the table styled. Use tables for tabular data. Don't use tables to layout your page. Ask Mike or Owen about any non-standard page styling you need. See this page in Edit mode for the examples below. The striped format is enabled by starting the table with '<table class="zebra">' The summary text appears in text-only browsers that cannot display tables. It is also read out by screen readers designed for the visually impaired. It's good practice to include a summary for every table in this form rather than in some general purpose paragraph markup.
| Name | Cups | Type of Coffee | Sugar? |
|---|---|---|---|
| T. Sexton | 10 | Espresso | No |
| J. Dinnen | 5 | Decaf | Yes |
...or striped
| Name | Cups | Type of Coffee | Sugar? |
|---|---|---|---|
| T. Sexton | 10 | Espresso | No |
| J. Dinnen | 5 | Decaf | Yes |
Categorising a Page
(aka tagging)
There is one predefined vocabulary (for levels) at the moment and one free vocabulary. These are required. You can enter keywords or phrases of your own under 'Free tags' provided they are separated by commas. When the page is displayed it will contain hyperlinks to each of these categories. A category page in turn links to every page that is a member of that category.
Input Format
Use Full HTML unless the page already uses PHP. (If it does, do not edit anything in between <?php and ?>>
Workflow
See the full explanation here.
The idea here is that we allow authors to write, proof reviewers to review, editors to publish, and readers to read only published material. Use the status buttons in the Workflow section to determine the visibility of the page to these different groups of users. Ignore the 'Published' check box that appears in 'Publishing Options' at the end of the edit page. It should always be checked.
Mathematics Markup
The site supports a large subset of TeX (and LaTeX - even some AMSLaTeX) through the jsMath module. Type something in TeX, select it, and press either the $ or $$ button to enter inline or display maths markup around it. The site should do the rest on submit or preview.
Bibliography and Citations
A bibliography record can be created using the normal Create Content link choosing the new 'biblio' content type along the way. You will be directed to a form that allows you to describe the publication. See
Adding author credits
When you first create a page, the authoring information section of the Edit tab will be filled in. This will create a message such as 'Posted by XXXX' where XXXX is your account username. You can change XXXX into something more meaningful by going to 'My Account' > Edit > Public Information, and filling in some details there. The text you type into the 'Full Name' field will be used in place of XXXX.
In addition, each article has a list of authors appended to it. The list can be edited in the 'Author(s)' drop-down in the edit tab.
