Template:Infobox/Doc

This is a template documentation page. It is transcluded into place.

Purpose

Template Quest by LionsPhil
Thread

This is the template for making a neat infobox for a quest, as shown on the right. Put it at the top of quest pages. It automatically adds the page to Category:Quests, and will add Template:Noauthor and Template:Nolink if appropriate. You'll still need to list Category:Running Quests and Category:Image Quests as appropriate.

Usage

Parameters (all are optional, although at least author and thread1 are expected):

Metadata

title

Title of the quest. Defaults to the current page name; normally you should leave it to do this.

author

Quest author; will be linked to as a wiki node, even if it has whitespace.

image

Quest image, without namespace. Will be thumbnailed to fit. Optional.

Threads

All thread parameters must be numbered, starting from 1 and increasing monotonically (no gaps). For example, thread1=500|thread2=600….

threadN

Post numbers for the threads of the quest.

threadNname

Optional 'name' for the thread, e.g. "Chapters 1–2". If the first thread is named, a numbered list is used to automatically provide the thread numbers.

disthreadN

Post numbers for discussion threads.

Specials

For example, 'April Fool' versions of quests.

specthreadN

Post numbers for any 'special' threads.

specthreadNboard

Board for corresponding 'special' thread; defaults to quest.

specthreadNname

Required name for corresponding special thread.

Other

prethreads

Value is spat out verbatim in the thread block, before thread 1. Avoid using this; it's for some very special cases where quests have some of their threads hosted externally. It is not for subheadings.

suppresscat

Set this to something non-blank to prevent automatic categorisation. You probably don't want to use this.

Example

A quick reminder of MediaWiki template syntax; whitespace is reasonably flexible either side of the pipes, so do whatever is most readable:

{{Infobox|author=TestPattern|image=tozol_title.png
|thread1=79880|thread2=94645
|disthread1=316424
|specthread1=156238|specthread1name=April Fool's Edition
}}

There are some more abstract examples on the development testing page, and you can find pages using this template.

Maintenance notes

• Depends on the automatic redirect from /quest/ to /questarch/ for archived threads (semantically, the /quest/ version is considered its canonical URI). This allows the "current thread" to work without having to be flagged as special in any way.
• Depends on the ParserFunctions extension to support optional parameters gracefully. This makes the code pretty hairy, so take care editing.
• The maximum number of threads is limited by the implementation repeating the definition for each number. Unfortunately this is a common MediaWiki paradigm as it has no set handling in templates.