[ Planning ] Pokemon Wiki - Suggestions, Questions and Feedback - Page 15

Nvm. Can't get it to work ;-;

I'm waiting, don't worry. I'm not going to do anything without clarification.

@Luke: Much simpler. XD

Edit: Right, so basically me and Luke have been talking about ways to implement a simple categorisation so each page is categorised into their appropriate generations. And we may have found a solution. I have come up with a very basic code to add to Template:PokeInfo but will leave it up for Benedict to implement, as I have an idea on the navigation and workings of the Template. I can gather how it works, but dare not touch it. ;P So if you all want to see the code used and some examples of it being used follow the appropriate links;

• Template
• Examples

Please refrain from editing unless you know what you are doing. If anything the only person I would want to edit it is Benedict.


[size=1][color=#666666]This message was edited by Dragoon on Dec 12 2009.

Me and Relmutsie were actually discussing about using the #if attribute, but I was unsure if it would work. Thanks for the clarification.

This has been implemented onto the PokeInfo template, tested it and it works. ^^ Just add

code

|gen = GENNUMBER

anywhere in the infobox and it will categorise it into the right generation. Thanks Benedict for implementing and Prometheusx303 for the help.


[size=1][color=#666666]This message was edited by Dragoon on Dec 12 2009.

quote Dragoon

Me and Relmutsie were actually discussing about using the #if attribute, but I was unsure if it would work. Thanks for the clarification.

#if is actually called a Parser Function, which was added with Extension:ParserFunctions (How to use).

By the way, whenever a page is requested by the web browser, every Template call on that page is re-rendered in case the Template itself changed since the page was last rendered. This is one of the core advantages to Templates because you can update a Template to change something on many pages at once. However, if you do not plan on changing a Template in the future, then the MediaWiki software will be wasting time rendering Templates that will never change, which defeats the main purpose of even using Templates.

I am aware that if you are intending to use that code in the PokeInfo Template, but if you had been doing something similar to simply decrease the amount of code you have to write on each individual page, and you never had the intention of changing the Template, then you would be decreasing the readability of the edit page, as well as wasting server time every time anyone goes to that page on the Wiki. To resolve this problem, you can use something called substitution, which is where the result of your Template call is substituted onto the page instead of the code for the Template call itself.

To use substitution, you place the "subst:" prefix before the name of the Template, Parser Function or Magic Word. The way it works is that when you save the page with "{{subst:Example}}", all of the source code for Template:Example is copied and saved onto the page instead of just the code "{{subst:Example}}". This change is not visible during preview, but if you click the "Show changes" button, you'll see the code that is being saved onto the page's source. After saving it, if you click the edit tab again, you'll see the page with the substituted Template code.

One drawback to using the subst modifier is that all of the code of the Template is substituted, including Parser Functions, such as #if. Unfortunately, that may result in the following code:

code

[[Category:Generation {{#switch: 2 |1 = I |2 = II |3 = III }}]]

That is obviously a waste because you know that it should be simplified to "[[Category:Generation II]]". To solve this problem, you have to substitute the #switch Parser Function as well, which can only be done in the Template source:

code

[[Category:Generation {{subst:#switch: {{{1}}} |1 = One |2 = Two |3 = Three }}]]

Unfortunately, when you save that onto the Template page, the substitution happens right then on the Template page itself, so the #switch Parser Function is evaluated immediately using the text "{{{1}}}", and the result is saved in the Template source. So, after saving that code on the Template page, the Template source would actually end up as this:

code

[[Category:Generation ]]

Then whenever you call the Template, that's what you'd get. To fix this problem, you have to syntactically interrupt the substitution in the Template source. I usually do so using the <includeonly> tag:

code

[[Category:Generation {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>#switch: {{{1}}} |1 = One |2 = Two |3 = Three }}]]

That should work ideally, but there is another problem: Since the category tag is on the Template page, the Template page itself is being categorized into [[Category:Generation]]. That's kind of annoying, and to fix this problem, I'll usually place the whole of the Template source between <includeonly> tags, which makes none of it render on the Template page itself. Unfortunately, if you do this, it will interrupt the <includeonly> tags surrounding the subst modifier. The solution to this is to interrupt the subst modifier in another way, which is to create a Template that includes the subst modifier itself, then call the Template where you would like to place the subst modifier. I use a Template called Subst that contains the following code:

code

<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>

It is then implemented like this:

code

[[Category:Generation {{{{Subst}}#switch: {{{1}}} |1 = One |2 = Two |3 = Three }}]]

At that point, you could use {{subst:Example|gen=2}}, and the page would be saved with "[[Category:Generation II]]".

I didn't write that Template guide for nothing you know. I'll finish it someday.

quote Prometheusx303

quote Dragoon

All that's left for me to grasp now is #explode. I've got basic knowledge of most of the others.

Let me know if this explanation is not good enough.

Sorry for not posting about Pokemon in this thread..

This message was edited by Prometheusx303 on Dec 13 2009.

Even I can hardly understand that. I had to learn the hard way.

Hmm, darn. Well, here's another example of how it's used:

code

{{#explode: a.b.c.d.e | . | 0}} = a {{#explode: a.b.c.d.e | . | 1}} = b {{#explode: a.b.c.d.e | . | 2}} = c {{#explode: a.b.c.d.e | . | 3}} = d {{#explode: a.b.c.d.e | . | 4}} = e

As for what they're used for, that really depends on what you want to do. For instance, on WikiGuides, normal pages are of the naming pattern "HubName/Page Name". If I want to retrieve only the HubName, then I would use this code:

code

{{#explode: {{PAGENAME}} | / | 0}}

If I wanted to retrieve the part after the first slash, I could use this code:

code

{{#explode: {{PAGENAME}} | / | 1}}

On WikiGuides, I basically use that very method to retrieve different parts of page titles. In fact, I created a Template called HubName that contains the code from the first example. Then, whenever I use {{HubName}} on a page, it gives me the name of the Hub (i.e., the part before the first slash in the page name).

Another Template on WikiGuides, called AutoCat uses the HubName Template to automatically categorize a page into the Hub's main category. Here's a simplification of the Template's code:

code

[[Category:{{HubName}}]]

Since the AutoCat Template is included on every page, that gets added to every page, so all of them get automatically categorized into the main category for their Hub. Also, some pages on WikiGuides, such as the Main Page, don't have slashes in their names, and as a result, {{HubName}} simply returns the same as {{PAGENAME}}. Unfortunately, I don't want to categorize the Main Page into Category:Main_Page, so to fix this problem, I include a condition in the Template to determine whether or not the category tag should be included on the page...

One way to do this is to simply test whether or not there is a slash in the page name. To do this, I would use the #pos Parser Function, which returns the position of a given string in another given string. To find the position of a slash in the page name, I would use this code:

code

{{#pos: {{PAGENAME}} | /}}

If the slash was at the beginning of the page name, that would return 0; if it was the second character in the page name, it would give me 1, and so on. If, however, there is not a slash in the page name, then it would return an empty string (nothing). Fortunately, the #if Parser Function can be used to determine whether or not a string is empty, so to determine if there was a slash in the page, I would simply need to use the #if Parser Function on that expression, like this:

code

{{#if: {{#pos: {{PAGENAME}} | /}} | [[Category:{{HubName}}]] }}

That way, the category tag would only be included on pages that have a slash in their titles.