Browsing Bookstack

Now that we have an overview of BookStack and briefly touched on some of the core features we are going to take a deep dive into navigating around BookStack and the TNTable Wiki. This page will cover getting set up to browse efficiently, some useful features on the interface, as well as some tags that are going to be helpful for organising content.

This lesson is a bit interactive, follow along with the examples to get the most out of it. Let's dive in!

Keyboard Shortcuts

This requires some set up to enable, but it is strongly recommended to do so as it can make browsing much faster. There is even a super helpful overlay cheat-sheet available.

First step is to click on your profile in the top-right corner. Then into My Account > UI Shortcut Preferences. Check that box to enable keyboard shortcuts and we are ready to go. Take some time to look over available shortcuts but don't worry too much about remembering them. BookStack has a neat trick to make it easy to check. On any page (except the editor, we will get to that later) simply type a question mark (?) and an overlay will appear with available shortcuts.

This is useful for navigating to the search bar without your hands leaving the keyboard, or going to all the books available. When viewing pages you can navigate to the previous or next page too. If you are reading a page and want to make an edit simply press e to start editing.

Breadcrumbs

For those unfamiliar with breadcrumbs in this context keep on reading. Anybody that is can skip to the next paragraph. Breadcrumbs in a web-browsing context are similar to the breadcrumb trail left by Hansel und Gretel. It is a trail through the layers of navigation to get to a page. For example look at the top of this page. It goes Shelves > Wiki > Contribution Guide > Browsing BookStack. Let's break that down a bit. Shelves is the "root" or basically the beginning of the navigation layers. Everything in here either belongs to a Shelf, or belongs to something that eventually belongs to a shelf. Then we have Wiki which is the name of the shelf that all the Wiki books go such as this one. Then we are currently reading a book called Contribution Guide on the Wiki shelf. Finally, we are reading the page called Browsing BookStack in the Contribution Guide book on the Wiki shelf. Get ready because some books also have Chapters, which will add yet another layer of navigation, but the idea is still the same. Now you can kind of see how everything is organised here.

In BookStack's breadcrumb system you can click on any element to bring you there. For example, on this page, clicking on Contribution Guide will bring you up one level to the book view containing all the pages. Similarly clicking on Wiki will bring you up two levels to the shelf view containing all the books in this shelf. That's not all though. If you click on the arrows between the various content-types it will show "sibling" content. That is, content that is at the same level as it. So, clicking on the arrow between Contribution Guide and Browsing BookStack will show you all the other pages in this book. Similarly if you click the arrow between Wiki and Contribution Guide it will bring up a list of the books in the shelf, since Wiki is a book, they are all on the same layer of navigation.

The last note I will leave this section with is that you can search within a breadcrumb, however it will only search elements at that level, it won't go deeper. This means if you are looking at the other books in a shelf, searching will not show you pages.

The search bar at the top of the page, accessible by typing /. This will search all content, no matter where you are.

Page References & Linking

Each page has a references section to see all the pages that link to them. This can be useful if you are on a server page and want to see what projects are linked, or other pages. Check it out on desktop in the top-right under Details. Look for Referenced by x items. On mobile look for the Info tab at the top of the page and then it is the same as desktop.

Browsing Tags

~~Talk~~Last ~~about~~thing to cover is tags. These are extremely useful for grouping pages together, getting special attention on pages, and just generally useful for organising content. We will cover how and when to use tags in the Editing Pages section, for now it is best to get a good understanding of how to use them to navigate BookStack to better inform your usage of them while editing.

The easiest way to search all content with a given tag is to simply click on it in the top-left of a page. You can also search for tags by enclosing it in square brackets like so: [tag]. For example if I wanted to search for all the pages with the Pet tag I would put [Pet] in the search bar.

Getting more advanced here, if you wanted to search for all pages with the Owner tag where David was the value, for an example see Edgar Allan Bro, type the tag name followed by an equals sign. Example: [Owner=thephonatic22].

Finally, tags can also be added in the search page, on the left side. Take a look and experiment with tag searches there. It follows the same principles except you don't need square brackets there. Feel free to also experiment with the other search parameters to see the various ways you can find and filter pages.

Next Steps

Now that you're a BookStack navigation pro, it is time to take a deep dive into editing pages. The next page has some handy tips for getting the most out of pages, as well as a cheat sheet showing you all the elements and styles in action.