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Related topics: Recent Changes, Template:Post

The Forum is a central location for discussions that would be of general interest to other contributors. This also includes putting a link here to very specific discussions that are carried out on the talk pages of articles. The general idea is having one place to check for recent contributor discussions. The wiki is growing and there are now many contributors helping cover more topics than ever. The forum should help avoid missing reading and participating in discussions about standards and practices as the wiki continues to evolve.

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Page Template Updates

All Page Templates are currently under review/construction in preparation for the next release of the Wiki Swiss Tool.--Tlosk 08:26, 24 January 2009 (CST)

Individual Creature Template

The Individual Creature Template has been significantly changed in form though not in substance. It now uses a template for the table that lets you fill out the data in line rather than amongst tons of formatting info. The notes section has been kept out of the wiki template because there's a lot of variability there and also for a technical reason (you can't have actual page sections like == Notes == within a wiki template because when you click on edit it will take you to the template page and not stay on the page where the template is being used. Also just to clarify, a Page Template is what we use as a skeleton for an entire page, a Wiki Template is a smaller section of formatting code that is used within a page. So a page template can contain several wiki templates as part of it.

I made two more tweaks, now any stat left blank will automatically show as ?? so when go back to fill them in don't have to erase and for the xp just put the number. --Tlosk 06:37, 23 January 2009 (CST)

To: Tlosk Nice, those changes will work. Question... Can you use the variables in more than one page on the page? Like Class? Or is it a 1 to 1 relationship? The other suggestion I have is to change some of the wording at the bottom to make the What Links Here line be automated instead of relying on someone to properly pluralize it. So, by default even the Class, Maybe something like this: * [[:Special:Whatlinkshere/{{PAGENAME}}|Locations]] where a {{PAGENAME}} can be found. --Atarax 16:35, 23 January 2009 (CST)

To: Atarax That's a good idea, to avoid agreement issues (a/an etc) I made it so it just says "* <Name> Locations." and added it the creature template. As I'm going through the old creature entries and changing them I've come across quite a few that were either missing the plural name all together or weren't pluralized so this will make it a lot better. For example: {{Locations|{{PAGENAME}}}} displays as: Forum Locations. (Dungeons | Landscape Spawns | Points of Interest) --Tlosk 13:08, 23 January 2009 (CST)

Point Maps

See Template talk:Map Point Plus and Template talk:Map Point.

Wiki Templates

I've created a new help page, Wiki Templates that references several new formatting templates with more to come soon. The general idea of a template is it takes formatting code that is complicated and/or used in many articles and lets you refer to it rather than use it on every page. There are two benefits to this, one it makes posting simpler and second, it makes it possible to change the formatting for all those pages with a single edit to the template page rather than to all the individual pages. These are different from Page Templates because they are used within a page for a part of it, rather a layout for an entire page. There's no obligation to use them, and they aren't universally good, what you gain in ease of use, you give up in terms of being able to customize or stray from the format when you need to add things unique to that page. But overall templates help give the wiki a uniform feel, allow neophyte users to make complicated constructions, and minimize errors. --Tlosk 06:38, 24 January 2009 (CST)

Creature Template

To: Tlosk I think I found a bug with the creature template, see Coral Tower for an example. If you try to show a creature class like Misc. Creature Class it will not work. Also, if you want to mask that link, like Wall, it will not show the label, only Misc. Creature Class

To: Atarax Misc is an exception, you put just Misc. Creature Class for the Class, then put what is displayed under the Subclass and it will show correctly. However if a case comes up where you need to have an alias for a parameter for a template, you can use {{!}} instead of a pipe. For example: {{Related|:Category:Maps{{!}}ALL MAPS|Unmapped Dungeons}} displays as: Related topics: ALL MAPS, Unmapped Dungeons --Tlosk 13:20, 22 January 2009 (CST)