Greetings, Horrorstorians! You may have noticed some changes in articles over the last few days. Under the hood, Wikia has made some new tools available (including a very powerful language for building templates) and ours is one of the first wikias to be able to implement them. Our Infoboxes are one of the first items to be able to benefit from the changes, and I've been redesigning them to work more powerfully. Some of the syntax for using them has changed. For existing pages: FlufferBot, our resident software bot, will be guided through altering existing templates where possible. This is not a foolproof process, and there may be some issues along the way.
Why change things? There will be a massive improvement in speed, and the new articles will be easier to maintain. Also, combining templates will be much less difficult, as many will compile and be cached internally.
The new Infobox character[]
Example of a character in InfoboxBuilder
The first set of changes:
- image is no longer naked. It requires the full [[File:]] reference syntax (inside brackets), and size does matter to a lot of folks. (Namely, if you don't put a size here it screws things up in Firefox and IE and maybe other browsers, too.)
- season is getting replaced by story. Remember how confused we were going to be when there was talk of Coven running multiple seasons? The paradigm has changed. Use the name of the story instead. For now, the season # will work, but that may not be the case going forward. There's a rumor that we'll have at least one character who appears in multiple stories, and this change will allow for that soon, too.
- maintitleorder replaces maintitlesprominence. No new functionality, but a simpler and more concise name.
- sortkey: No more fumbling with DEFAULTSORT.
- first-appearance, last-appearance, and episodecount are out, replaced by appearances.
- relatives is folded into relationships. There was never a real need to have these separate.
- death-episode is on its way out, too. Use {{Cite episode}} next to cause_of_death instead. It's much cleaner, and allows characters to have multiple deaths. Thank you, Coven.
- No more brackets! Forget <br /> or puzzling out lists. Between entries on a line, use a semicolon (;). This works for: altportrayer, species, occupation, relationships, and anything else going forward.
- An introduction is the rule, not the exception. It needs to be suppressed by "= suppress " to not auto-generate. This is for consistency that has not always been enforced in the past.
- description makes for a more enticing contextual introduction.
- othernames replaces aka.
- plural and gender are highly recommended. plural is only necessary when more than one character shares the Infobox (like Troy and Bryan).
- additional for additional information.
The new Infobox episode[]
Example of Episode by InfoboxBuilder
Changes here include:
- image is no longer naked. It requires the full [[File:]] reference syntax, and size does matter to a lot of folks. (Namely, if you don't put a size here it screws things up in Firefox and IE and maybe other browsers, too.)
- season is getting replaced by story. Here, too, the paradigm has changed. Use the name of the story instead. For now, the season # will work, but that may not be the case going forward.
- sortkey: No more fumbling with DEFAULTSORT.
- premiere replaces airdate. A somewhat more accurate term for modern serial programming or television, and how it is broadcast and streamed.
- writer now takes multiple names separated by (;). No more brackets.
- An introduction is the rule, not the exception. It needs to be suppressed by "= suppress " to not auto-generate. This is for consistency that has not always been enforced in the past.
- additional for additional information in the introduction.
Version 2.1 (the next revision) of both of these will have more goodies. In the meantime, the rollout will take some time before it hits all pages. Happy editing!