Idea of the Wiki “syntax” is that you write something that looks and feels like a normal text, not a soup of angled brackets and double quotes, and computer converts it to HTML for you, according to certain rules.
Most of the “syntax” in Instiki is determined by the markup engine it is configured to use (which can be Textile, Markdown or RDoc). Markup engine is responsible for fonts, styles, headings, paragraphs, lists, tables and other such formatting.
Instiki.org is using Textile markup. You can find detailed user guide for this markup here:
Before a page is passed to the markup engine, Instiki applies several conversions of its own. Namely:
CamelCasedWords and [[words surrounded in double brackets]] are interpreted as names of other pages on the same wiki, and displayed as hypertext links.
Example
[[User's Guide]] → User's GuideWikiWords → Wiki Words
[[!include SomeOtherPage]] is replaced with contents of SomeOtherPage.
If you change the contents of SomeOtherPage, the changes won’t been seen in pages having this include until the next time they are edited.
See also: http://dev.instiki.org/ticket/93
All Pages and Recently Revised can display all pages on a wiki, or only those pages that belong to a particular category.
For example, here is a list of all pages in Help category
To classify a page in some categories, add a line like this to it:
category: Bugs, Features, DontKnow
Note, that it should be on a line of its own, and it can contain multiple categories separated by commas.
It is customary to put the categories line at the bottom of the page (as you can see on this very page).
You can also write it as :
:categories: InvisibleCategory
Note the first : (colon) – this makes the categories line invisible on a displayed page.
Markup engine usually have some special syntax for URLs. For example (Textile): "Google":http://google.com is converted to Google
Instiki, however, will try to identify anything that resembles a URL and convert it to a hyperlink, too.
Thus, www.google.com → www.google.com
Finally, you can tell Instiki not to do any conversions of the text at all. Text included within <nowiki></nowiki> tags is written to the page verbatim. No other markup that may be within these tags will affect its contents, including Textile or Markdown processing.
Surrounding markup (such as pre, code, div blocks or lists) will still affect the contents.
Example
Markup:
This line has normally rendered <nowiki>[[double brackets]]</nowiki> and this URI <nowiki>www.example.com</nowiki> is not autolinked.
Result:
This line has normally rendered [[double brackets]]
and this URI www.example.com is not autolinked.