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March 14, 2018
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The job of a Wiki Article widget is both straightforward and powerful. Like the name suggests, it displays a single Wiki Article from anywhere in your digital workplace. Often overlooked in favour of the more popular Wiki Index widget, the ability to host individual wiki articles creates a lot of opportunities.
The key advantage of Wiki Article widgets is that their content isn't static. It's updated dynamically from the source article every time the widget loads. Changes to the source article will automatically be reflected in every widget that draws from it, anywhere in your Igloo. This is a contrast with the HTML Content or Links widgets, which are designed for use on a single page. If you have a menu or information area that needs to be in several places, a Wiki Article widget is the best way to handle it.
What's more, because wiki articles give you access to the full text editor, you can create tables, arrays of links, or add custom CSS and images to the article, and they'll pass over to the widget. They'll also be reflected in any new Wiki Article widgets created with the same source.
The most common use case for the Wiki Article widget is to show information in context and guide people through a process. You can it on Pages to show a relevant policy or SOP, like an employee review process, and include calls to action or additional resources in the sidebar, giving you full command of the Igloo widget suite to customize the Page. People can find the article by searching, but you can also direct them to the Page where they'll have all the resources they need at their fingertips.
Wiki Article widgets are also compatible with additional widget customizations, such as custom CSS, the tabded widget feature, and the accordion widget. Many digital workplaces use the accordion feature to include several Wiki Article widgets to a Page without drowning members in text. The headers are easy to find, and people expand the policy they need.
One of the most important things about the Wiki Article widget is the way empowers members to create their own practice and policy areas. A team leader or department head may want to create a policy area in their Space for practices their team frequently refers to, for example. The Wiki Article widget lets them do it by referencing the original policies, so they can move with the confidence that their Page will always have the most up to date articles.
The Wiki Article widget makes your articles more than resources to be consulted in a central hub. It transforms them into tools for your Space Administrators and power users to shape the workflows of your members and place your practices or policies directly in context, rather than relying on banks of links or duplicating content.
If you have questions about the Igloo platform, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.
4 Comments
Thanks for a great tip!
Is there a place that features examples of successful implementations of these changes? There's just so many different ways to present information...
Great tip. Is there a way to tag an article as the Main article inside of the Wiki Channel?
Great question, Vidia Poleon. Every wiki channel has a front page article, otherwise known as the Main Article. It's designed to give people the opportunity to create a custom index, or include guidance on how best to use the wiki.
It can be edited by using the Edit Article option available at the root level of the community.