Special: pages in Trunk Notes

Trunk Notes reserves a few page name prefixes – Docs:New: and Special:. If you try creating a page starting with any of these you will be told off and made to choose something else. In this post I will give you some details about the Special: pages and what they are used for.

First up is Special:WhatsNew. When you upgrade Trunk Notes to a new version you will be asked if you want to view this. It contains details of all changes to released versions of Trunk Notes. If you want to see exactly what is new then check this out. Related to Special:WhatsNew is Special:Version. This lets you know what version of Trunk Notes you are running. If you need to report a problem then always let me know what is contained in this page. Finally there is Special:Debug. If you are having issues with Trunk Notes then you might look here to see if there are any worrying debug messages!

A page that you might want to check out is Special:SetStyleSheet. If you can’t find this turn on Custom Stylesheet in the Trunk Notes settings. By default this has a copy of the standard stylesheet. A stylesheet is written in a language called CSS and contains instructions for Trunk Notes on what fonts, colours and layout to use. By changing this file you can change the look and feel of your wiki pages. For an introduction to CSS have a look at http://www.w3schools.com/css/

Next up in customising how Trunk Notes works are Special:Header and Special:Footer. Any text in these pages gets automatically added to the top and bottom of each page. Here are some ideas for how you might use these:

  • Add a list of pages linking to the displayed page – put {{backlinks}} in Special:Footer
  • See the tags which a page has – add {{tags}}
  • If you are an advanced user why not add some JavaScript to do something cool

Another useful page is Special:Badge. By default this page includes the text {{tagged ToDo}}. When you switch from Trunk Notes to your home screen any list items are counted in this page and if the number is bigger than zero the badge on the Trunk Notes app is set. Try tagging some pages with the tag ToDo and see this number go up. You might change this to use a number of different tags, or to use the GTD functions such as {{dueinnext}} or {{action}}

The last useful page is Special:Encryption. This page has controls to forget a recently entered encryption password or to change the password. This page represents the master password. Trunk Notes doesn’t store the password you set but rather it encrypts this page’s content with your chosen password. If when you type in your password it can successfully decrypt this page then your password is correct. If it can’t decrypt Special:Encryption then your password is wrong.

There is one more page – Special:Tagged. This is what links in tag clouds or lists of tagged pages point to. Try adding [[Special:Tagged?tagname=Work]] (replacing Work with one of your tag names) to see what I mean.

It is very likely that more Special: pages will be added to Trunk Notes in the future. Have fun!