Extension:Page Forms/Quick start guide

So, you've set up all the software on your site. Now what? Now it's time to create the structures to hold, display and enable adding and editing of your data; thankfully all of this can be done simply by creating various wiki pages.

The first step should be to figure out your data structure. What types of pages will the site have? What data will be contained on each one? You can change all of this around later, but you should have a starting plan. Once you have that (ideally, written down), you can move on to creating the necessary wiki pages. You will need to create or modify four types of pages: pages for properties, templates, forms and categories.

Creating data structures - the very easy way
The page "Special:CreateClass", defined by Semantic Forms, provides a single helper form to define everything about a data "class" in one place. If you fill out the fields and hit "submit", the page will create all the necessary property, template, form and category pages automatically. Then you can go to the form page that was created, and start entering data.

Creating data structures - the more comprehensive way
You should take the following steps:


 * Create properties. The basic building blocks of any semantic site are the connections between data, which in Semantic MediaWiki are known as properties. A property is used to specify a single piece of information about the topic of this page. Every property should be defined on your wiki, with a page in the "Property:" namespace. Create each property by going to the 'CreateProperty' special page.


 * Create templates. A template sets the display of the data on a page, holds the markup to turn the data into actual semantic information, and (often) defines the page as being of a certain category, and thus of a certain page type. There will generally be one template per page type, although sometimes a single page type will contain more than one template. A template can also be used for aggregation, by displaying a list of all other pages that have a certain relationship to this page (see the inline queries documentation for much more information on this). Create the template(s) by going to the 'CreateTemplate' special page.


 * Create forms. Now you can create forms to allow users to easily add and edit pages of various types. There should be one form per page type; the form will populate the template or templates that this page type contains. As before, there's a special page to create new forms: 'CreateForm'.


 * Create categories. One template in each form should tag each article that the form creates as being part of a certain category. You should create a page for each such category, and specify a default form for it so that every article is automatically editable with the same form that created it. The easiest way to do that is by using the 'CreateCategory' special page.


 * Enable links to forms. Besides creating categories that have a default form, there are other steps you should take to enable users to access the forms that you have created. These include adding links to add data in the sidebar and elsewhere, and setting default forms and alternate forms on properties, to have red-links to nonexistent pages point to a form for creating them. These actions are all explained in the section "Linking to forms".


 * Add links on sidebar and elsewhere. The sidebar (which, for English-language wikis, can be edited at the page "MediaWiki:Sidebar") should hold links to add each of the data types, and to the categories for each of these data types as well. You can also include such links on the main page and elsewhere.


 * Add data. Now you can start entering data! Just go to the form page(s), and start creating pages.


 * Customize. Once the structure is in place, you can customize all you want - changing the look-and-feel of the entire wiki, of the various templates, and of the forms, adding and changing fields and adding and changing inline queries for queries.

Example
To see this process in action, see the example of how these steps would be followed for an actual wiki.

Quick reference guide
A two-page quick reference guide, or "cheat sheet", for Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Forms and a variety of other extensions, exists, suitable for printing. It can be found here, in PNG (image), PDF and SVG formats.