Pausing Wiki Work

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Nymphetamine
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Pausing Wiki Work

Post by Nymphetamine »

Putting a pause for the holidays on wiki work. I want to look into a few things regarding building actual real templates for infoboxes on the wiki. This will make using the templates a lot easier for the general and new users of wiki markup, in addition, will make it difficult to break the actual formatting. Instead of players having to worry about the label/data pairs, they can just plug in things into fields that make sense. It also means that if the template, for whatever reason, changes, it won't necessarily break 1000 pages. Whereas, when I just finally realized that I can add a width modifier to the labelstyle field to make it so it's 33% of the infobox no matter what, I have to go through and add it to every page manually.

Building these infobox templates is going to be a pain in the ass, but it will be worth it. It's just a matter of whether or not pausing the work on the wiki, and then retroactively going back to change everything over is worth it. Personally, to me, it will be, and adds to my whole... thing about laying down the ground work so that if someone takes over in the next few years, they aren't completely mystified to what I did. Haha.
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Nymphetamine
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Posts: 601
Joined: Thu May 10, 2012 1:09 pm
Preferred Title: Marog the Destroyer
Characters: Aezra
Azalia Stygian
Eliya Almakira al-Fasaad
Ianesene
Isabelle Auxerre
Nesira Vertal
Rix
Senkessa Silak-Dekhal
Siraz'jah Av'Zathrak
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: Pausing Wiki Work

Post by Nymphetamine »

Update on this.

I think I've got it figured out how to do the more complex templates. I should be able to set it up so that fields are hidden if they aren't used and/or are left blank. This might take some more work, but I'm finally getting the hang of how this needs to be written.

The templates people will use will be a lot easier to look at and fill out.
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Nymphetamine
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Posts: 601
Joined: Thu May 10, 2012 1:09 pm
Preferred Title: Marog the Destroyer
Characters: Aezra
Azalia Stygian
Eliya Almakira al-Fasaad
Ianesene
Isabelle Auxerre
Nesira Vertal
Rix
Senkessa Silak-Dekhal
Siraz'jah Av'Zathrak
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: Pausing Wiki Work

Post by Nymphetamine »

I've just now finished building the hard coded template, and the cheater's template.

This is the hard code: http://www.arangoth.org/wiki/index.php? ... _Character If you look at this, it uses a lot of variables to build the template. The variables are plugged into the data fields with appropriate label tags. In some places, it will automatically add link definitions where needed. It resizes the pictures, manually, all without the player needing to even see this stuff.

http://www.arangoth.org/wiki/index.php? ... r_Template This is a page built using the Player Character infobox template. Look at the code for this one. You'll notice that all of the variable fields from the Player Chara template are present. And some of them are left blank. When they're left blank, they will automatically just not parse into the finished product. (Which is awesome, because if we need to go back in there and add something later, like for country mottos or whatever, it will be there, waiting for us. Like a puppy.) This is 100x easier to read as a player/novice wiki user, as well as fill out. There's also less of a chance that they can break it this way. It's impossible to ruin the formatting since all of the formatting is handled in the first link. Additionally, if we ever feel the need to change the colours for the label and header fields on the wiki pages, we only need to change it on the template pages, rather than across the 300 pages that we'll probably have later. This makes updating the look a million times easier.

The downside is, these templates would be set in stone. Adding fields later is easy but, if you don't include a field on a page, that's listed in the template, it will throw an empty, ugly field of "Label(n) = {{{data(n)}}}". I suppose this isn't a major crisis, given the flexible nature of the wiki itself, and that we'll be looking at these things. But it IS something to consider.

Anyhow. I spent the last like... 8 hours mucking around with this off and on while RPing and crap, I'm gonna take a break. I'll see about hammering out some additional ones tomorrow. They're actually not horrible to do once the first one is done, and everything is figured out HOW to do certain things. Moving over the currently built templates to this format will be easy. Changing all of the in use pages to use them will be a bit of a job, but shouldn't be too horrible with only 75 pages on the wiki so far. (Only 75. Shoot me.)

Update/Edit: I changed the links to reflect the fact that I've already moved over the character template. I'm working on countries right now and need my test page back. :O
Last edited by Nymphetamine on Fri Nov 23, 2012 5:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Nymphetamine
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Posts: 601
Joined: Thu May 10, 2012 1:09 pm
Preferred Title: Marog the Destroyer
Characters: Aezra
Azalia Stygian
Eliya Almakira al-Fasaad
Ianesene
Isabelle Auxerre
Nesira Vertal
Rix
Senkessa Silak-Dekhal
Siraz'jah Av'Zathrak
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: Pausing Wiki Work

Post by Nymphetamine »

Completed:

Country
Character
User
Religion

Trying to do them in order of how soon they're needed. I should be able to whip the rest up tomorrow.
Last edited by Nymphetamine on Sat Nov 24, 2012 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Nymphetamine
Admin
Posts: 601
Joined: Thu May 10, 2012 1:09 pm
Preferred Title: Marog the Destroyer
Characters: Aezra
Azalia Stygian
Eliya Almakira al-Fasaad
Ianesene
Isabelle Auxerre
Nesira Vertal
Rix
Senkessa Silak-Dekhal
Siraz'jah Av'Zathrak
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: Pausing Wiki Work

Post by Nymphetamine »

I was distracted like a squirrel with shiny things. The conversion over is slow going. If you need a template done, feel free to request it, otherwise, I'll probably be going at some sort of Margo-logic ordered pace. Who knows what that will mean?

Wiki work is unpaused?
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