Creating a new cave in the online system

Process

This page and those following describe the process for creating new caves and entrances, and especially how to add images/surveys so that they appear correctly online.

Two ways of creating a new cave in the online system

• Filling in the online form
• Editing a file and uploading it

For experienced people creating a batch of small caves the file upload & import process is quicker. Most people won't use this method for their first cave so it is documented separately in new cave file method.

In other words you can either add caves (or entrances) using the web-interface or you can check out the 'expoweb' repository using the version control system and just edit the files.

Nevertheless you will find it useful when filling out the form for the first time to have some idea what is going on behind the scenes. So you are recommended to have a quick look at the new cave file method even if you have no intention of using it.

Recommended procedure

You will find the process a lot easier to follow if you Edit an existing cave first, because then you can see all the necesary fields filled in. You can then fill out the form for your new cave using that as an example to follow. But of course be very careful not to actually chenge anything on the form you have open for editing.

New Cave form

The links to follow to open up the "New Cave" form or the "Edit Cave" forms are somewhat obscure. Go to the main cave index page which lists all the caves: Cave Index and right at the bottom of the page (you will need to scroll down) it says
New Cave.
But don't click on it yet, first we will edit an old cave.

Edit Cave form

First make sure that you are logged-in to the troggle website. You almost certainly are already, but if you are trying this on a new machine this can catch you out. Go to expo.survex.com/accounts/login/. The username is "expo" and the password is the usual "{cavey}:{beery}" one.

• Now open the cave page for an existing cave, e.g. augstb-4.
• Now you can see that at the top there is a bullet point link labelled "Edit" - this is for editing entrances so don't touch it.
• What you need is the line saying "Edit this cave" at the bottom of the top left-hand menu. It has a little icon of a pen next to it.
• Click on it. A form appears.
• Scroll down the page - it is a long form - and look at the"Description file" and "Url" fields. These are the critical fields to get right when you create your own cave using the New Cave form.

Effectively each field on the form is concatenated between tags to make an XML page for the cave (or entrance). So each field you fill in on the form may contain arbitrary HTML. Be careful!

Gotchas

There is a problem in that when you create a cave for the first time it doesn't know about the cave, so the drop-down menu of caves does not include itself. So a new entrance has to be assigned to an existing cave (which is in the drop-down), and edited correctly later once troggle has fully absorbed the existence of your new cave.

Detailed walk-through of an example

TO BE DONE - in a separate page

List of New Cave/Cave_data fields

The full list of fields is documented: the full list of data-entry fields when creating a cave.

Back to the previous page in this sequence New rigging guide.
Now go the the next page in this sequence Write the full cave descriptions with diagrams.