CreatePage

From Inside Wikia

This article has been copied to Wikia Help. See Help:CreatePage.

This feature is currently in limited release. You can see it in action here: http://potbs.wikia.com by creating a new page. Note: this is a live wiki so while taking a look is encouraged, please don't save "test" pages).

[edit] About CreatePage

The new CreatePage feature is intended to make it easier for your viewers to become contributors. Many people who would like to contribute get scared off by wikitext and infoboxes. By creating standard templates that feel more like a form to fill out, you'll make your wiki a more friendly and inviting place for people to add some information and insure your information has a more standardized look and feel. Most wikis already use standard templates for page layout or formatting and you can grab some CreatePageExamples. The latest incarnation of the create page tool introduces a brand new feature – createplates. These are predefined layouts for certain types of pages that will enable users to quickly and painlessly create pages adhering to the wiki's style and formatting guidelines.

This guide will show you how to customize this tool to best suit your wiki's needs.

[edit] The key concept: createplates

To create a page such as this one at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, the user would have to fill out fields such as Name, Species and others shown in the right column, and then go on to write the three sections visible: Character in brief, Personnel File and Service record.

The main idea behind CreatePage is to facilitate creation of articles based on their type and structure. A user will be able to pick from a set of article types. We've called these createplates (since they're so similar to templates, yet are to be used only when creating new articles).

Each createplate, when selected, presents the user a different set of fields to fill out and then transforms the text given into a fully-fledged article.

[edit] What should be a createplate?

The first thing you have to determine is what sort of article groups deserve to have createplates.

Bear in mind that you should only have createplates for those categories of articles, which can be populated by a large amount of pages. Think broad. The easiest way to come up with such a division is to look at infoboxes – if you use an infobox for a set of pages, they should probably also have a separate createplate.

For example, Memory Alpha, a wiki about the Star Trek universe, could have createplates for character articles, episode articles and planet articles, each with its own layout.

[edit] Createplate list

What createplates are displayed on Special:Createpage depends on the contents of your wiki's MediaWiki:Createplate-list article. Each createplate is defined by a separate line with the following layout:

Name|Caption|Icon

Name 

This must match the name of the createplate definition (see below). Note: This is case-sensitive.

Caption 

This text will be displayed below the createplate icon.

Icon 

The full URL to an image that will be an icon for the createplate. This is an optional parameter. Note: There is no default size for the icon. Take care to choose images of about the same size in order to get a neat look.

[edit] Createplate definition

The definition of each createplate is stored in an article in the MediaWiki namespace. The naming scheme for these is always MediaWiki:Createplate-Name (note: this is case-sensitive), where Name is the Name parameter given in MediaWiki:Createplate-list (see above).

[edit] Basics

First off, each createplate must contain a special tag: <!---useMultiEdit--->. This tells MediaWiki the article is to be treated in a special way. The tag should be placed at the top of the page.

When you have that, you can shape your createplate to best suit your wiki's particular needs.

The easiest way to use createplates is to simply define article sections in them. Just include standard wikimarkup section headers in the definition and watch CreatePage transform each into an input field with the specified header.

For example, let's say you want to have a character createplate. Typing the following in MediaWiki:Createplate-Character:

== Background ==

== Powers ==

== See also ==

would give a set of fields shown on the image below:

Basic CreatePage: using headers

[edit] Infoboxes

Infoboxes are templates containing basic information on the subject of the article. They present the most important information in a concise form and in a uniform way throughout all the articles of a given category.

CreatePage distinguishes infoboxes from regular templates by their names. Each infobox should have a title like: Template:<name>Infobox, where <name> is the lowercased name of the Createplate it's used in, ex. for Createplate-Quest this should be Template:questInfobox.

Infoboxes will show up in the form like this:

CreatePage: infobox form

An example of an infobox template call:

{{locationInfobox
 |name = Location name
 |image = <!---imageupload--->
 |caption = Image caption
 |map = <!---imageupload--->
 |mapcaption = Map caption
 |type = Location type
 |level = Level range
 |location = Location
 |inhabitants = Inhabitants
}}

Note: the <!---imageupload---> tags are the only supported special tags inside the infobox. You can use them as in this example.

Of course, all the createplate will contain is a template call, just like a normal article does. The template itself, along with its layout and any logic behind it should be put into a separate template article in the template namespace. In the case of the above example that would be Template:locationInfobox – this article has to exist on your wiki to make use of those supplied parameters.

[edit] Additional markup

Apart from handling sections and infoboxes you can also add a few additional things to further enhance your user interface and functionality.

<!---descr="<text>"---> 

Allows you to enter an additional description text, that will appear in small font under section name in createpage. This is useful for describing what this field is about, what should go in etc. Please use only one <!---desc---> tag per section.

<!---title="<text>"---> 

Replaces the section's title with the given text. This is only visible in CreatePage and is not placed in the article.

<!---imageupload---> 

When used within a section, this creates an image upload box for that section. We can have many image upload boxes for each section.
When used within an infobox, for example like Image= <!---imageupload--->, this will substitute the input box for that parameter with an image upload box.

<!---category="<text>"---> 

Allows you to specify a default category for articles created with the createplate. The <text> parameter should be the name of the category, without the namespace (e.g. if you wanted to add Category:Help to a createplate, you'd have to include <!---category="Help"--->.

[edit] Other features and tricks

• If you wish to have a lead section before any headers (similar to Wikipedia and many other wikis), insert a blank line between the <!---useMultiEdit---> tag and the first header.
• You can link to a specific createplate and have it loaded automatically into CreatePage by adding the createplates parameter in the URL like so:

  communitytest.wikia.com/wiki/Special:CreatePage?createplates=Character

[edit] Notes

• Special:Createpage show up under the "Restricted special pages" list on Special:Specialpages.

[edit] Feedback

• Please leave feedback on this Inside Wikia forum thread.