First off welcome to the team. Now on to what matters, getting you ready. I use my own PHP parser to do this, so I require the guides to be written in a certain way. It's not really restrictive.
Example Guide. Please open the example and take a look at it. The first two lines are just basic XML lines for the most part. Basically it's saying that to be valid it has to obey the rules in guide.dtd (located in the xml folder of this site). I go a little further in asking that you write it in the order given in example.xml, that way my parser can read it.
You'll notice next the first tag (and last) is the guide tag. This is basically just like the HTML tag, except you need the attribute cat on it. The cat is the category of the guide, I'll list them below, it just helps me when adding them in. Honestly if you think the file can do well on several just seperate each with a comma. 0 is the category for example guides, if you make a file that is just category 0 I'll ask you where you meant for it to go, if you meant for it to be an example please state so when sending it to me (I'll get to sending them in later).
Next is the author section, the name is required, but can be your handle, I use Arenlor. Site and Email are both optional, but site is free advertising and email is good if you want to provide support for your guide. Date is required, but is only used by me to tell when a file was created, the reason I standardized it was because if I have over a thousand of these in the future to go through it'd be a pain to do it by hand, so I'd just create a parser looking for older files to check and make sure they're still valid.
Next is the instructions part, the meat of the whole thing. Think of it like the body tag in HTML. You need to start with either an example or a p tag. I'd prefer you start with a p tag. Of course you need to close the p and example tags. Examples are turned into pre tags so please push the content again the left (no tabbing/spacing over) and leave newlines (press enter) between the content and the tags. This is because of how my parser works. Also because of how it works please DO NOT split up your lines with p tags.
The example tag has an optional title, which appears above the example. P can contain format tags, which are in reality just span tags, so style is CSS, so just use CSS.
Files are optional, but if you add one the name attribute is required, this is the text for the link is all.
Please keep them in that order:
Now to go over the dtd, guide contains one author, one date, one title, zero or more file, one instructions. Author contains one name, zero or one site, zero or one email. Name, site, email, date, title, and file all contain text data and nothing else. Instructions contains one or more p, zero or more example. P contains zero or more a, format, and character data. Format contains zero or more a and character data. Example and a both contain character data. Guide is required to have a cat attribute that contains character data. Format is required to have a style attribute that contains character data. Example may have a title attribute which contains character data. A is required to have an href attribute which contains character data (like an HTML a tag, duh). File needs a name attribute which contains character data.
The XML folder may be accessed by anyone, so feel free to look at the files in there. 00000000.xml is a fill in the blank guide file. Take it to help you.
To send in a guide zip it with any files or leave it by itself if you have no files and email it to me, arenlor@arenlor.com and I'll check it out and add it.
The current categories are:
Released Under the Arenlor Freedom License