Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2013/October

Dialog tools update

 * Help:Wndialog

My full intended set of dialog actions for editing is now deployed. As long as we don't need our wizards to do things besides edit (such as rename/delete/protect pages, or site revisions), there should be (fingers crossed) no need to tamper further with the javascript infrastructure of the tools. Part of the objective of these tools is to put wizard creation and evolution within reach of wiki markup, hence within reach of the whole wiki community (rather than a high priesthood of users able to work with javascript or lua), so it's a big deal to not have to tamper further with javascript.

At full build-out, my tools should have three tiers: My punch list of the next few things I want to do has, at the moment, only a little in tier 2, and is mostly in tier 3. I anticipate learning a lot from expanding tier 3 about what is wanted in earlier tiers. --Pi zero (talk) 13:56, 22 October 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Actions and interactivity support.  This involves a lot of javascript coding.
 * 2) Templates, and techniques, for using the actions.  This is likely to involve a small degree of carefully-chosen lua.
 * 3) Wizards and other similar sets of pages for practical use by reporters, reviewers, admins.  This should be done entirely in wiki markup; when necessary, it may be supported by additions to the earlier tiers, but such additions should be chosen for extreme generality so that each such addition greatly reduces the incidence of future need for further additions.
 * Because modifying a page has the potential to do damage, I'm taking my time about introducing pages that do so. Here are two pages that use the interactive tools:
 * Category:LauraHale (Wikinewsie)
 * User:Pi zero/wndialog/demo
 * Tier 3 tools I envision include HotCat-like devices; buttons such as the "submit" button on develop; an upgrade for EasyPeerReview; article wizard(s); tutorials and demos; and assistants for things like review, archiving, and nearly any routine action such as a nomination. --Pi zero (talk) 15:41, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Template question
I found this template on a user's page: User:Brian_New_Zealand/icons (obviously, with the template brackets before and after) which cause the little project icons to line up on the top right of your page, but couldn't find that template stored anywhere here. Is it stored at Meta? --Bddpaux (talk) 17:40, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
 * User:Brian_New_Zealand/icons is a redirect to User:Brian/icons, because User:Brian_New_Zealand was renamed to User:Brian. --Pi zero (talk) 18:17, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, so technically, it's not really a template, it's a user sub page.....? Some days I TOTALLY GET TEMPLATES and other days, I don't know a template from a Junebug! --Bddpaux (talk) 18:42, 29 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Any page can be transcluded onto another page, by putting its name between double curly-braces. When a page name is used that way, it's assumed to be in template space (prefix "Template:") unless some other namespace prefix is specified (such as "User:").


 * So there are two possible definitions of "template". A "template" is a page in template space, i.e., its name has prefix "Template:".  Or, a "template" is any page that is primarily meant to be transcluded.  Some projects do weird stuff where a page is meant to be used both directly and as a template, which in my experience is technically clever but really confusing.  --Pi zero (talk) 19:23, 29 October 2013 (UTC)