Forum:Coding

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Welcome to the Coding forum
This forum is dedicated to discussing matters of template and bot coding. These matters are now distributed across various talk pages, and it is hard to later find these gems of information. So how should we use this forum?
 * put it on the watchlist (duh)
 * post questions
 * post answers
 * post links to questions and answers elsewhere, new or old
 * post announcements and links to these
 * post requests for help with (debugging) templates or bots
 * anything else related to templates and bots

Watchlist
This forum won't fly if people aren't watching it. Please sign here (using three tildes, ) to indicate you do.
 * --mendel
 * &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]]
 * &mdash;[[Image:MaySig.png]] Warw/Wick
 * -- [[Image:merty_sign.gif]]-- ( talk )
 * -- Shadowphoenix 
 * Orite - I'm ment to sign Random Time
 * See RT's comment  &not; Wizårdbõÿ777  ( talk ) 09:00, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I like new .css and .js hacks [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 05:20, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Useful links

 * Forum:Coding/Javascript - handy Javascript functions to use in your personal .js file

MediaWiki features

 * meta.wikimedia.org Help:Templates
 * www.mediawiki.org Extension:StringFunctions
 * help.wikia.com Help:Extensions (those are installed here)
 * Parameters to index.php let you display the page in various ways: render, print, view with ads, view with Monobook skin, raw, raw with templates processed. action=purge can solve problems with caching.
 * http://trac.wikia-code.com/ if you ever want to browse wikia source...
 * Database dumps, especially the current pages, come in handy for searching the wiki offline.

AutoWikiBrowser

 * Wikipedia Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser

Perlwikipedia
You need a C (?) compiler and the utility make to get Perliwikipedia to run. These come free with MinGW or cygwin (see below).
 * Perlwikipedia module, a MediaWiki framework for Perl
 * Perl central
 * Active Perl, free Perl distribution for Windows

pywikipedia
User:Dantman has a fork of it, and some adapations linked on the userpage.

GNU tools for Windows
The GNU tools are a suite of powerful tools used by programmers around the world for decades. They have originally been written for a Unix-like operating system, but most of them have been "translated" to windows, usually from the same sources.
 * MinGW, a collection of tools for compiling C/C++ programs, including `make`, `gcc`, etc.
 * CygWin, a huge collection of GNU tools (the closest you can come to running GNU/Linux on Windows); includes Perl.
 * GnuWin32, a collection of useful tools that can be used separately. GnuWin32 doesn't include the gcc compiler, so you need to find a port of that elsewhere (e.g. in MingW).
 * gawk, a port of `awk`, is the tool mendel likes to use for quick automated text processing tasks.

Feel free to add more useful links.

Interwiki Transclusion
See User:KyleH. Since when is that possible? --mendel 01:39, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Been a while, obviously. See Shared_templates. --mendel 12:36, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Skill Bar and other stuff
--◄mendel► 14:35, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) There is a workaround for #ifexist. Let's say article "redlink" doesn't exist. Then  is   to Template:redlink . Of course this costs a lot when "redlink" does in fact exist. However, it ought to work well on images as they typically have short articles if any. So.
 * 2) In finding that out, it helped that one can add action=raw&templates=expand&ctype=text/css to an URL to see the un-htmlized version of a page after template expansion. Are Mediawiki URL additions and options (liek action=raw and ctype) documented anywhere?
 * 3) Why did PanSola make Template:Skill_bar/doc when there is, in fact, no documentation on that page? Can anyone propose a simple way to find those templates that have no docs? including those that have a /doc with nothing on it? not even a stub tag or something? Hmm, probably comes down to parsing pages_current again.
 * 4) Is  used for user skills at all, or is it only supposed to be used for existing skills?   is not likely to work for any parameter outside mainspace, and in fact there is no article that starts with Image:User: . So the technique to get the correct image that I used in  could be ported to, and that would avoid the #ifexist entirely.
 * 5) We could then have skill bars for monsters and totally, like, not use.


 * Two errors in the code example you posted (that you are probably aware of anyway): first, you have to have a colon after #ifeq (#ifeq:); second, the first word of the image name will be titlecased by MediaWiki, so the second part of the comparison needs to reflect that ( :Image:Someimage.jpg  ).  So:.
 * mediawikiwiki:Manual:Parameters_to_index.php
 * Maybe he was planning on documenting it later, and "later" never came? I don't know how to easily find undocumented templates.
 * I'm pretty sure Skill bar is only used for existing skills, and removing the #ifexist: from Skill bar box would completely empty Category:Pages with too many ifexist calls.
 * I'd be for that, although we'd still need a separate template because monsters rarely need a full 8-skill bar, while the userpages that use it do expect a full 8-skill bar (a lot of them have "Optional"s in the middle of the bar). This "Monster skill bar" would only need a simple modification: each line that calls a Skill bar box would be wrapped with an #if:, like  .  &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 04:23, 27 June 2008 (UTC)


 * 1. Hah! That's how you know I didn't copy and paste that code snippet!
 * 4. Let's just remove the #ifexist then!
 * 5. We could call that Template:Skillbar (and it wouldn't have  in it) (Yay for 7 closing braces!).It might be necessary to put a single  around all the #ifexist so that a stack of nonexistant boxes at the end doesn't add too many spaces to the last table cell. You can then express Template:Skill bar as   if it ever becomes necessary.
 * Actually, see User:M.mendel/Templates/Skillbar, User:M.mendel/Templates/Skillbar2 and User:M.mendel/Templates/Skill bar box.
 * I could write short articles on "Optional" (possibly redirect to "optional skill" and write that) and "generic resurrect". The cheapest fix to the missing monster skill icons is to do image redirects for them, going from Monster skill.
 * To fix the way Skillbar2 looks now, there are two options: a) undelete Template:Optional and write Template:empty and Template:Generic resurrect, or revert my Skill bar box to what it was before and use the image redirects for the monster skills. --◄mendel► 10:32, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Color
There is a template called. It is deprecated. Instead we have now W-color, R-color etc. LordBiro once advocated doing that with CSS (and apparently that still works) - I would advocate that for pretty much the same reason. It causes no extra server headaches, and needs just a browser that can cope.

For template colors it seems to make sense to me to use templates without parameters, i.e., or even. The first version sorts better, the last reads better. These templates would just return the color code, i.e. they'd be extremely short and contain no parser function at all. We have 11 colors, in light, dark, possibly "border" and "background", and the new pale. The professions exist abbreviated and written out. (Whoever thought up these abbreviations ought to be stoned, why can't I just substring the first 2 letters? Argh!)

I am bringing this up because I want to experiment with a set of "pale" background colors, and I need to make templates for them. Unless we change site CSS. (Well, I guess I could experiment with personal CSS and change site CSS later...) And of course I need to use the long versions for input... :-( --◄mendel► 01:22, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Skill box damage output Template
Ok, I need your advice here. I'm currently trying to clean up the Area of effect skills quick reference page. In this page the Template:Skill box damage output is used. However, the 'damage' column isn't needed here and all mentioned skill (-templates) don't have 'damage' filled in, so it will result in a list full of tags. My take on this is that there will be 3 options: What would you think ? What is common here, in such situations ? -- -- ( talk ) 11:59, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) Drop use of this template, write your own table
 * 2) Copy existing template to new template, take damage column out (and maybe alter notes column too)
 * 3) Adjust existing template and insert clever trick to 'hide' damage column if needed


 * As a quick fix, I made the tags disappear when there is no damage. Is there anything that should be listed for these skills instead? --◄mendel► 12:43, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Hey thanks Mendel, thats quick ! As far as I can see, I cannot think of anything that should be listed instead. Now we have an empty 'damage' column and 'note'. Ah well, at least its a start..ty :) -- [[Image:merty_sign.gif]]-- ( talk ) 09:37, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Dialogue CSS
I would like to propose some CSS for Mediawiki:Common.css to easier format cutscene and other dialogues. div.dialogue p { text-indent:-4em; margin-left:4em; font-weight:bold; } div.dialogue p i { font-weight:normal; } See User_talk:Quizzical for the intended effect.

Quotation marks could be added with these two lines (if there's no bug) : div.dialogue p i:before { content:"\201C" } div.dialogue p i:after { content:"\201D" } --◄mendel► 21:37, 7 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I tested these lines on my global.css and they work (the quotes, too). --◄mendel► 13:22, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Why does this work?
Q: Hey, I'm sort of teaching myself the different coding languages (got hung up on javascripting, bleh), and I was wondering why the code for the div class dialogue works. The code is, as follows: div.dialogue p { text-indent:-4em; margin-left:4em; font-weight:bold; } div.dialogue p i { font-weight:normal; } The answer I got to was that because of the javascript that already exists, each page is written in a way that the javascript sees the apostrophe and decides to write a paragraph style, either "p", "p i", or some other third "p" type for normal text. As I said before, I don't know how to code so I can't check the javascript file and see if I'm right or not. If you could enlighten me, it'd be greatly appreciated but, by all means, don't feel obligated. &mdash; Powersurge360  18:47, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

A: This has absolutely nothing to do with Javascript; it should work just as well when you turn Javascript off. (Well, on NN4.7 turning JS off also disabled CSS, but that was years ago in a galaxy far, far away). The CSS comes into effect after the wiki has converted the wikicode to HTML. The wiki converts regular text to paragraphs ( this is a paragraph  ) and apostrophes to italics tags ( this is italic text ). You can see this if you view the page source with your browser (provided you can find the text, you might want to use action=render to get rid of the wiki skin code ; see above on how to use that).

Now stylesheets (CSS) work by selecting a type of tag and specifying how content in that tag should be formatted. You can either put the format in the style="" attribute in the tag itself; or you can put it at the top of the HTML file; or you can import it at the top of the page file from another file. If you put p { color: red; } at the top of your HTML page or in a .css (like w:Special:MyPage/global.css), all text (all paragraphs) in the HTML that includes this style will be red. Headings won't be affected, because they aren't inside tags, they use, etc.

We need to select more specific paragraphs, though. div.dialogue p { text-indent:-4em; margin-left:4em; font-weight:bold; } means we select all tags that are directly inside a tag; and not just any tag, but it has to have class=dialogue. This means any paragraph text inside the is indented and bold.

Now one final adjustment is necessary: the text in italics should not be bold. Therefore, we use div.dialogue p i { font-weight:normal; } to select text that is inside  tags inside tags inside a with class=dialogue, and only that text is made to be not bold, but normal.

All this is being done by your CSS-compatible browser without any Javascript at all. --◄mendel► 19:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, so I didn't do too badly, I understood most of why it worked, but didn't quite get how the wikicode became HTML mark-up (assuming it was javascript as opposed to whatever it actually is). Thanks for moving/explaining it. &mdash; Powersurge360  19:21, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Javascript can put additional HTML text on a page after the wiki has sent it to your browser (the nav boxes that show/hide work that way), but that's not the case here. --◄mendel► 19:28, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Naming Convention for Templates
Do we have one? "BeastInfo", "QuestItem", "Skill box", "Effext box", "Shield begin info", "Quest-stub", "Unique-item-stub", "Location info", "CollectableCategory", "ElonianMissionProgression", "MonumentsNavBox". Guess we don't. --◄mendel► 05:35, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Category list for AWB
As long as making a category list from within AWB doesn't work, you can use Special:Export to create a category list. Enter the category name into the top box, click "Add", copy the contents of the big edit box to a text file, and let AWb make a list from that.

For deprecated methods of generating a category list by scripting, see here in the page history.

Mini Database Dump
The Database dumps are quite big - editing a 250MB with a text editor is a daunting task. You can make a miniature database dump that contains just one page with Special:Export. Just enter the page name into the big box and click "Export". ("Save as file" doesn't work for me, though.) The XML file you get has exactly the same structure as our big database dumps. ◄mendel►

...makes four. Right? Well, it should. Apparently our version of MediaWiki doesn't have support to do exponentials. Is there perhaps some alternative workaround I could use in the meantime? Calculating a power manually is quite messy...

If a^(b(x)): ...and I'm trying to make a damage calculation template, so after that the user would then need to multiply by the Raw Damage. That is too much work for the user, I think.
 * 1) I evaluate b(x) (=c)
 * 2) Truncate the value (=d)
 * 3) Multiply a by itself d times
 * 4) Take the remainder after truncation by subtracting d from c (=e)
 * 5) Output to the user that they must manually multiply a by itself e times to finish the calculation

Maybe I should just go bug Kyle instead. (T/C) 06:56, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Ok, I've done some digging. Meta documents powers (and logarithms and whatnot) since May 10th, albeit not on the m:Help:ParserFunctions page. They seem to be running ParserFunctions (Version 1.1.1), same as we. Ofcourse they're running MW 1.14a, and it seems that the calculations are somewhat dependent on the server OS as well. I'd wait until we get MW1.13 and file it as bug report then. ;-) (But since the database has just been locked, who knows? we may already have that.) 2^7= --◄mendel► 11:32, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * So close to achieving the ultimate dream of GuildWiki coders... :\ Other than this obstacle, I think User:Entropy/dcal should be ready for deployment soon. I wonder why it seemed so difficult before, it's really quite a simple thing to do if you put the data-gathering as the user's duty. To make it really really cool I would need to put in a whole listing of every damage source at the same, and a way to query its raw damage at a specified rank...etc. Lots of possible automation that I could add but it would make the template grow exponentially. (Pune.)
 * Random idea...I wonder if we could use an outside site to do the math? I know there is some template somewhere which puts out calls to an outside site for...timezone differences or something. [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 14:42, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, Template:TZ. <- Check it out. Then we would do http://WEBSITE_THAT_DOES_MATH_BASED_ON_URL_IMPUT.com?math=2^ or such.
 * Actually, if someone had their own website, it would probably be a lot easier to make a template that calls out everything to there and then the website returns the data to the template for display. I am sure it would be easier to code this without the restrictions of MediaWiki. Less drain on system resources also. [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 14:50, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * The way that would work is to make it site Javascript and link to it from the sidebar. I envision someone clicking on a "damage calculator" sidebar link, then a small window pops up that lets you do the calculations.
 * Good default values are "12" for attributes, "60" for armor, and "20" for a level. That makes casters do 60 damage with no mods, (hope that's right - I am too lazy to check), so that'd be a good damage default for average weapons as well. --◄mendel► 17:06, 8 September 2008 (UTC)