File and page naming conventions

Name Prefixes in Use

See Attilla's excellent discussion of naming conventions below.  Since that was written, I've had to name some pages, so I've started following this advice. Specifically, I've used the following name patterns so far:

About-xxxx	Pages about the RASC organization itself (council, meetings, location, web site).
Image-xxx	Images for their own sake (e.g. publishing members' meeting images). Meeting images are of the form Image-YYYYMM-desc
Observing-xxx	Pages about Observing: technique, observing reports, challenges.
Sites-xxxx	Pages about observing sites (Saunders, Pinhey's, etc.)
Events-xxx	Pages about events (star parties, banquets, etc.). Use a second keyword for event type (Events-StarParty-Saunders-Oct2008)
Feature-xxxx	Monthly feature articles.
UserId-xxx	Pages containing personal publications of individual users. e.g. "mcdonald-magnetic-fields", "smith-articles-list" etc.
Astronotes-Month-Year	Publicly-available astronotes (Published approximately 2 months after the issue. Current issues are available separately, for RASC members only.)

Attilla's Original Notes

The need for a naming convention comes from the risk of some user creating a page with a very generic name that prevents us from properly naming other pages. For example, if one member creates a page called "equipment" to describe their personal scope, then we would not be able to create page called "equipment" to describe the scope lending library.

The usual solution is to agree on something like a directory structure, and then name pages with with their directory path. Something like <dir1>_<dir2>_equipment. Though the notion of a directory is better though of as a topic.

Here is a suggest list of top level topics

• About us
  • what is the RASC
  • what is the Ottawa center
  • club faciliteis
    • book library
    • telesope lending library
    • FLO observatory
  • contacts / member lists / who to ask
  • club faq
  • astronotes

• Observing
  • Observing Events
    • public star parties
    • members observing events
  • Observing Tech
    • observing tips
    • equipment tips
  • Observing Sites
    • FLO
    • Saunders Farm, etc

The topics need not be strict hierarch, so we should have catagories like these that also link togther pages elsewhere

• public outreach

• astrophoto gallery

• articles
  • astronotes
  • members articles

Also the naming conventions for pages need not constrain how we lay out the links on the main page. So for example, if we decide that "public_outreach" belongs under "about", it should be a major item displayed on the mainpage.