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Revision as of 20:12, 17 July 2020
Introduction
Cultura italiana is a project aiming to create a network and to enhance cooperation among centers of Italian culture and language at abroad.
It is meant to be composed of at least 2 components: a back-end platform, represented by this Mediawiki site where authorized staff of centers of Italian culture and language can add or structure their organization information in a collaborative way and with attention for semantic data, and by a front-end platform, currently represented by this site, where the created contents can be viewed, searched and enjoyed by visitors in an attractive and modern way, including from mobile devices. (depending on what side you are reading this content, one of the links will point to itself)
The project has been initially implemented, since November 2019, within the frame of a European Solidarity Corps project (funded by European Union), is supported at the moment by the center of Italian culture and language in charge of the project which ensures its continuity over time (as well as that the requirements of the project are met) and foresees the inclusion of other institutions and organizations interested in taking part to the initiative.
Application form
The use of this platform is free for all Italian language and culture organizations world-wide.
Just fill-in the form below and we will contact you promptly in order
to set up your account and to send you any useful information.
You will be immediately able to:
- manage a wiki-like page of your organization plus an arbitrary number of sub-pages (like the following)
- contribute to the creation of contents of general interest (like Opportunities, Reading suggestions, Digital libraries and open source books) which will be broadcast to all visitors through an internal advertisement system (see picture) without any fee!
- structure your data and information through a reach set of features allowing their visualization in a front-end like the following, where external visitors can find all the material created by organizations, divided by geographical area and kind of contents
Pages structure
After registration, you will be assigned with a specific "domain" corresponding to a page in the form
https://culturaitaliana.org/wiki/[organization name]
which can contain an arbitrary number of sub-pages within it. Here are some information of a sub-page from wikipedia:
Making a new [[link]] that begins with a / (slash) is the common way to start a subpage. The page to which this link points is considered "subordinate" to its host page, and is titled and linked as [[Parentpage/Subpage]]. It is possible to create a subpage of a subpage (or a sub-subpage). At the top of each subpage or sub-subpage, you can find a backlink (a.k.a. breadcrumb) to the higher levels of the page.
In short all the pages of your organization will be located under a dedicated address but at the same time they will reside in a shared environment, both to ensure collaborativeness among organizations, and because by this way you can enjoy, de facto, a fully maintained platform, where site's administrators (meant to be IT professionals) will advice you of any consistency of the wiki text (which entails some complexity) and will take care of extensions, templates, modules, semantic properties, and all other elements which guarantee a profitable and rich experience both from the side of visitors, and the organizations themselves.
By default, your organization's data structure will take this form:
Forms & semantic data
Forms & semantic data (naming convention)
Forms & semantic data (naming convention)
Images upload & gallery
The Mediawiki version (1.35) powering this platform has been improved in order to support the storage of images and media files at a specific path, so that each organization can save all their images within a specific "folder" (under the main page itself of the organization, or whatever sub-page within it) and can easily retrieve them from the Visual editor's Media gallery, without mixing up their files with those of other organizations, and without file names conflicts or restrictions.
Frontend Index
The wiki page 'Frontend Index' contains a structured index of all your organization's page automatically created and updated by a server-side script.
This index is the editable instance of the index provided by the APIs wikipages and it is used as well from the official front end version of your website (for instance of this organization) in order to display the navigation menu on the left.
Through the editable Index on that wiki page, you can hide/unhide pages on the front end site (and therefore not present in the index) and even to rearrange them.
This is the Frontend Index of the root pages of this wiki and the Frontend Index of each organization will reside at the path
https://culturaitaliana.org/wiki/[organization name]/Frontend_Index
Banner
Every page of your organization can be headed by your organization's banner. Just upload a banner image under your page named "Banner.jpg", so that it will appear in the following url:
https://culturaitaliana.org/wiki/[organization name]/Banner.jpg
(the banner is therefore expected to be in jpeg format) and the system will automatically display it on the top of each of your pages, including on the front end site !
APIs
While you are establishing your organization's page structure at an address like the following
https://culturaitaliana.org/wiki/Centro_italiano_Barcellona
that is structuring all your information optionally using semantic data through this wiki platform, you can start querying your pages (or even all your site) through the following set of APIs, for instance in order to display them in your wordpress site, or in whatever third party site written in any computer language.
The following endpoints do not directly query the standard mediawiki APIs, but an extended APIs built on top of the mediawiki APIs (called autonomously by an internal script running in the background which keeps updated all the information) providing additional data, like the detected language for each page, all the semantic data related to each page, the "title structure" (to allow the use of slashes within the title itself, ensuring at the same time the coherence of the hierarchical structure) and more.
Basically, through the following APIs you can query all the information of the created pages or a specific "folder" within it (also retrieving a structured table of contents which can be easily used to create navigation panels, and of course, html content of pages) without dealing with the complexity and lack of immediacy of the standard Mediawiki api, which would require multiple calls and further elaboration to reach that result.
Parser functions
Join team
If you would like to participate to enrich the content of this platform for creating an unique eco-system of Italian culture and language, fill in this form and we will be happy to discuss the kind of contribution you might bring with you!
Private wiki
Optionally, we can provide you with a private wiki hosted at an address like
https://culturaitaliana.org/private-wiki/[organization username]
which differs from the public wiki in that it is not a shared environment, while it remains managed as its codebase, modules, templates, available forms and so on.
A private wiki allows you to store any private information (without using specific extension in the public wiki which would make some of your pages private, posing nonetheless security risks) with the maximum level of security (inasmuch as the wiki itself can be accessed only by authorized users) complementing the information you have on your public wiki.
For instance we allow the creation of pages representing language courses in the public wiki, and the creation of pages representing classes and students (registered together with their personal information) in the private wiki. This way, we can offer an additional platform, named 'classes', which combines the public as well private information of your courses, and provides a reserved area for your students where to retrieve their teaching material and even to interact with their class. [... to be continued]
For administrators
Technology we use
Here is a list of the tools we use to make this platform work. Of course each of them depends in turn by other tools (for instance Quasar Framework depends on Vue.js, and Vue.js is in turn composed by several components, like the router and vuex, a "state management pattern"), however, given a set even arbitrary of the most prominent tools we use, the reader might explore on his or her own both in extension and in depth the vast areas not covered by the following table.
(another way of indicating "frequently asked questions" which have not yet been asked)
(another way of indicating "frequently asked questions" which have not yet been asked)