A few ideas explain most of how Wiki Forge works.
Variants. Fan Forge, Hobby Forge and Wiki Forge (where these docs live) are themed variants of the same engine. Each has its own domain and look; the features are the same.
Wikis. Each community's wiki has its own address (name.fanforge.wiki), pages, files, settings, people and theme. Anyone can ask for a new wiki; the site admin approves each one.
Articles. A page, written in Forge Markdown: Markdown with wiki links, citations, components and emotes. Every article has a permanent id (like k3v9qa) as well as a title, so links survive renames: the editor shows titles, but links are stored by id.
Revisions. Every save is a revision with its author, summary and date. History, differences between versions, restoring an old version and rolling back someone's edits all work from revisions. Nothing is silently lost.
Components. The building blocks inside articles: :::infobox, :::tabs, a wiki's own ::legends-nav. The platform provides a set (Platform components); each wiki writes its own on top (Writing components), and that's where a wiki's personality and power come from:
- A component is one readable file: props (what an article passes in, each with a type), markup with simple logic (show this if, repeat that for each), styles kept to the component, and examples.
- Articles use a wiki's components exactly like the platform's, with completions and checks in the editor.
- Components can use each other, read the wiki's Wiki Data, and add tags and to-dos to the pages that use them.
- Change a component once and every page using it follows.
- Whatever a component does, it can't break a page or run scripts: its output is checked like any article's.
Files. Images uploaded to the wiki and shown in articles with . They're resized and re-encoded on upload and served from the wiki's own media address. See Images and files.
Tags and to-dos. Tags say what a page is about and list pages by topic; to-dos say what a page still needs, for editors only. See Tags and to-dos.
Wiki Data. Named data sets (a table or YAML) that components read, so facts used on many pages (stats, dates, lists, links) live in one place. See Wiki Data.