Houdini's Log

This is a page I created for me to dump stuff that's on my talk page that's useful. Pay no attention to it unless you find it useful to! I'll probably update this later/reformat it correctly.

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Here's a basic overview of how templates work and how to make a new infobox. You can find more information on this help page too.

```
Hi, my name is {{{name}}}, and my favorite color is {{{color}}}.

```

This shows how a very basic template looks. Any page that uses this template will have a sentence at the top that reads Hi, my name is name, and my favorite color is color". To fill out this template on your page, you would add this somewhere in your page:

```
{{Test
}}

```

The {{ tells the page you're about to use template I've set up on the Template:Test page. The Test right after the {{ tells it to use the template named "Test". The lines |name= and |color= tells the page what to put in place of the {{{name}}} and {{{color}}} on the template page. You can go ahead and try adding the code above to this Test page and trying it out.

You can add those {{{tags}}} into a table on the template page, and the page you enter the information on, your information would appear in the table that you made on the template page. This is how to make a simple single cell table:

```

```

```
 {| class="roundedtable" width="75%" border="1"

```

Which would look like:

 Row 3 column 1

The {| class="roundedtable" width="75%" border="1" begins the table. The class="roundedtable" tells the table to use the same style table that is seen on the front page. Width="75%" and border="1" tells the table that it should be 75% the width of the page and that all cells should have a border that is 1 pixel wide.

The |colspan="3" align="center"| '''Row 1 Title''' tells the table I want that single cell to be 3 columns wide and that the text should centered in the cell.

HTML tables also work in wiki pages if you prefer but I think the wiki format is much cleaner looking.

Below is a template that is built into a table. I'll explain each line.

```
{|class="infobox"

```

Each line means the following:

```
{|class="infobox" - This tells the table to use the infobox style that you see on the mech pages. You can add the width that you want it to be (a fixed width of 200px is pretty good)

```

```
 {|class="infobox"

```

To use this template on the Test page, you would paste the following code to where you wanted it to show up:

```
{{Test
}}

```

and simply fill in the fields.

## Advanced Stuff follows!

What if you don't want the word Capital to show up in the left field if nobody enters something in to the |capital= field. Then you would add the following so the entire row stays hidden if there's no answer entered:

```

```

If you use that in all of your fields though and don't know the answer yourself, then someone else who does know the answer and is looking at your page won't even know the answer is missing.

**New Skin**

I made a new skin for the site, so you'll probably notice some changes. The first thing you'll probably see is that you have a new message notification on the main page. The menu is on the left too now and I dropped the bottom repeat menu box. Finally categories show up correctly on the bottom mech pages, ect.

## Character Pages

I added a new filter (parser function) for the characters category. If you look at the [[Category:Characters]] page, you'll see a list that is sortable by news headline, news date, and the notable figure mentioned. It's done by editing or creating a new timeline entry with the form page. Look at this one for example. If you add the names of the people to that page, then the are automatically added to that table on the character category page. You can also create a test timeline entry [[Form:Timeline Form|here]. Any entry you make will be added to the interactive timeline on the main page. If you add characters, they will be added to the character category page, and enter the Federated Suns as faction involved for example, that new item will be added to the Federated Suns page (and Federated Commonwealth since that displays both FS and LC news). Feel free to play with that, just fix it when you're done. I'll add the ability to sort news by the names involved on the factions pages tonight, or if you want to, just add this "|? Notable Character" above the "|? News date" line on all the faction pages.--Seth 16:44, 15 December 2011 (MST)