User blog:Mark Otaris/New infobox system

In the past week, I have worked actively on creating new infobox templates, documenting these templates and modifying pages to use these templates. I have not  publicly talked much about these, except on the chat.

The old infoboxes were terrible, so I have decided to completely remake them. First, I have taken the infobox template (which is used to create infobox templates) from Wikipedia and brought it to this wiki. Then, from scratch, I have created many infobox templates and documented them.

As of now, these templates are the following:
 * Template:Infobox group
 * Template:Infobox player
 * Template:Infobox item
 * Template:Infobox hat

I think it is important to note that the item infobox is not meant to be used in articles, but rather to be used by other infobox templates. For example, right now, the hat infobox uses the item infobox template, which itself uses Wikipedia's infobox template. This makes it possible to structure the infoboxes for items (gears, hats, packages, etc) with more ease.

There are many things to be said on these templates, and since I will not explain them all thoroughly here, I strongly recommend that you check their documentation (just go to the template page, they're all nicely documented).

There are many very important notes on the documentation pages. I insist that you should read them. They are not compatible with the old infoboxes (the PlayerInfo, GearInfo, HatInfo, etc templates) and do not work in the same way. I have done all I could to make these new infoboxes as easy to use as possible. And I have also implemented some very nice features in them.

For example, the group infobox has a field for the owner of the group. When a value is given to that field, the template will automatically check if the owner has a page on the wiki. If he does, the template will create a link to that page. Otherwise, it will create a link to the user's profile on ROBLOX. All of that automatically, so you can just put the owner's name directly and not worry about links.

Another example is that a link to the item's page on ROBLOX is automatically created by the hat infobox (and all item infoboxes, actually) using the id of the item (which is mandatory).

The new templates also look a lot better than the old ones (in my opinion), and their code is much more cleaner. Another important detail is that they will greatly help in fixing the current category system by categorizing pages automatically and correctly. A good example of this is described on the talk page of the Dominus Empyreus.

So far, the templates are mostly complete, but I am completely open to suggestions. If you have any new field or feature to suggest for any infobox template, suggest it. In the next days, I will create the remaining infoboxes.

Once the remaining infoboxes are created, we will need to start working to replace the old system by the new. This is already done for groups: the old GroupInfo template was deleted because it was only used on 37 group pages, and it has been replaced by the new template on all of these pages. However, not all group pages already had an infobox, and it will probably take much more time for other infoboxes because while there are relatively few group pages, there are lots of pages for hats, players and other things that need an infobox.

For now, I suggest that we start by adding group infoboxes to all group pages that don't have one yet and replace the infoboxes on all the pages that still use the old PlayerInfo template.