User talk:M3lkor

From Exiled Kingdoms Wiki

On template section headings

I noticed that the behavior of the various template section headings is a bit inconsistent. Some show up even if the section is empty, others don't. Also, some headings are bold (heavily used, e.g., in QstSub), most others are not. Is there any masterplan behind the current scheme or is it just grown this way?

My suggestion for a more consistent appearance would be as follows:

  • Everything which is inherent to a specific type of template (like e.g. stats & drops for mobIndv, steps & rewards for qstIndv, etc.) should always show up, even if there's no content yet. However, there should be a placeholder message in this case (like <This section needs content to be added.> or simply question marks where appropriate) to indicate that something's missing there.
  • Everything which is more or less optional for a specfic type of template should only appear if there's indeed content. Because not every area must have NPCs or quests attached, not every quest is related to anything else. The same goes for all kinds of notes.
  • All headings should be plain. I don't think there is a need to highlight any specific ones by making them bold.

I think in this way newly created pages (which usually start only with a minimum of content) will look a bit shorter but less skeletal (not so many empty headings). Of course, some decisions on which sections are mandatory/optional may be debatable, but I guess most things are quite obvious.

I can go through the templates one by one if you like and make a first suggestion, hopefully not breaking anything. But usually you are much faster anyways. ;)

MikeB (talk) 02:18, 2 January 2017 (MST)

Wow, you're really fast paced. I will have a look into it tomorrow. MikeB (talk) 14:39, 2 January 2017 (MST)

Missing images

In the meantime I generated two placeholder images (Media:Missing.png and Media:Missing (small).png), intended to be put into place by the templates whenever a proper image is missing. The first one is for things which go into the infobox, the second one mainly for item tables and similar things. Maybe you can implement these into Infobox, LnkChk, etc.? MikeB (talk) 14:39, 2 January 2017 (MST)

I just noticed that you started putting the missing.png into the mob pages. It was actually not my intention that we edit all the individual pages with missing images, but rather that the template detects automatically whether a valid image is present and, if not, the missing.png and some descriptive text is put into place instead. Can you think of a way to implement it like this, so that we don't have to touch the actual content pages? MikeB (talk) 09:21, 5 January 2017 (MST)
So if I understand you correctly, the #ifexist function is the problem, because every call adds the page which is searched for and not found to Wanted pages, right? Or are there other parser functions which give us trouble as well? MikeB (talk) 11:54, 5 January 2017 (MST)

Newlines at beginning of pages

Just to let you know, I had some trouble finding out why sometimes the table entries in the last column are displaced vertically, such as is partially still the case in the NPC Table. Tracked it down to unintentional newlines at the beginning of the templates, e.g. between <noinclude>...</noinclude> and the subsequent template content. Removed the newlines from the main templates to fix it, but there are still a lot of NPC pages which start with <noinclude>[[Category...]]</noinclude> and cause the same phenomenon. That's why the NPC Table is still affected. The problem can be solved by removing any line breaks before {{NPCSub...}}, see e.g. A Shady Traveller.

So for any pages which act as templates we should take care that there are no unnecessary newlines and line breaks at the beginning, because this may lead to peculiar effects when used in lists and tables. Of course, the readability of the code is somewhat compromised, but I think we can live with that.

All in all, I think the newline behavior of templates is really messy and gave me quite a few headaches. Just read the article [1], but must admit that I'm still confused about the circumstances under which newlines/whitespaces are trimmed or preserved.

MikeB (talk) 13:24, 10 January 2017 (MST)

XP

Seems like we had the same idea... :-) MikeB (talk) 12:09, 12 February 2017 (MST)