Help:Editing Guidelines

Suggestion

Should we move this page to Help:Editing Guidelines? The Help namespace may be useful to keep these "non-wiki" instructional meta-pages collected. Namespaces in general could be very useful overall. --Shelby038 (talk) 00:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Templates

I've created a template for use for Bestiary stat blocks. I think templates are crucial for design as they allow quick changes in one location only, rather than needing to change every page where they are used. They are a big part of the wiki system. For example, we discussed the background color of the block. If we desired to change that color later, it can simply be done from the Template page. More than that, if later we wanted to format it more like the originals from the blog, that could be done without editing each creature's page. Check out the Alpaca page for an example of its use. I suggest this be done for any case where the same type of block is likely to be used: spells, for instance. --Shelby038 (talk) 00:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Sure. But I don't know how they work. I don't mind telling you, Shelby; my skill is in writing and design, NOT in html and programming; I'm learning all I can, but it isn't enough to just tell me something is good. I also need to know how it actually functions; what do I do with the template? Does cutting and pasting it to a new page ensure that a quick change affects all of them?

In general templates are used as:

{{templatename
| parameter = value
}}

Mediawiki finds "templatename," (in this example, Bestiarychart) and gives it the parameters and values that you've supplied. This ensures that all formatting remains the same, because Mediawiki only checks a single place for the formatting: the template source. What I will do (pending approval) is copy what I've shown on the Alpaca page, and modify it for each creature. I'd suggest to read Help:Templates but honestly it's quite dense; the "Creation" section is the only part written in half-way understandable English.