User:Aeakett/User blog/Announcing the grand opening of Brigh's Workshop!

Making citation templates can be a real pain, especially the more complicated ones that we use for the adventure path books. To that end I've made up a couple of tools to generate them in a more friendly manner.

For simple templates, go here.

For complex templates, go here.

It's a pretty good bet that there are some bugs, especially in the complex one. If you find a problem, please let me know, and I'll try to fix it. Also, with any luck I'll come up with some more do-dads to make our lives easier over time. If you have any suggestions feel free to bring them up. I can't promise anything, but we can certainly talk your ideas over.

We'll have to wait and see. The goddess sends inspiration in her own time. While we wait though, feel free to brainstorm about what you might like to see. —Aeakett (talk) Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:30:36 +0000

Great feedback, thanks. Some of those are the result of typos, others are truly wonkiness. I'll use your post as a checklist and strike stuff off as I get it fixed. —Aeakett (talk) Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:29:37 +0000

Wow, I totally forgot about this. I'm working on them right now. —Aeakett (talk) Wed, 19 May 2010 00:28:26 +0000

I actually thought about that. Given this week's events it does seem that I should think harder. —Aeakett (talk) Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:30:29 +0000

Very cool! Thanks for working it out. —Brandingopportunity (talk) Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:16:38 +0000

Any chance on getting one for the web ones too? I have a feeling I may be adding quite a bit from the web fiction.. —Cpt kirstov (talk) Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:03:04 +0000

These are awesome! What other cool tools does the goddess of clockworks have in store for us? —Yoda8myhead (talk) Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:23:50 +0000

The faithful of the Whisper in the Bronze ask for a script to consolidate repeated citations in the same article. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:44:09 +0000

A few comments after using the generator to make Template:Cite book/Stolen Land:

• The auto-fill Publisher entry should have double brackets around it.
• Correct syntax for #ifexpr has a colon not a semicolon after it.
• {{SUBPAGENAME}} should be added to the examples after {{Cite book/}} so that it shows the current page, as well as the Category sort field.
• When I clicked "add new article" the field alignment gets all screwy on the second and later lines.
• For some reason, it didn't generate code for the book Title field, leaving blank wikilink brackets in the code it generated.
• Making an easily selectable window wherein the generated code appears would be nice. Perhaps even a single button click to auto select and copy all included text. The single click idea would be great, but my initial research indicates that most solutions either require flash (which is way outside my abilities), or work only in IE. I'm not inclined to make something that works only in IE unless I hear enough requests. :-(

In general, though, this is an excellent tool and it really sped up the process of generating the template. Luckily I was able to correct the errors it generated, but not everyone is as familiar with the template as I am. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:39:46 +0000

Further feedback:

• There should be closing tags for </noinclude> and </includeonly> This one is making me crazy. I can't replicate the problem locally, so it probably has something to do with the sites template. This will take some time to track down... grr.
• Page numbers have an extra 1 added to the end in the generated code instead of adding one to the value entered in the last page column
• Semicolons are still present in the first section of expressions; the bottom set correctly use colons.
• The bottom set has an html code in place of an actual < sign, which I manually had to remove. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:39:48 +0000

The above issues are still present in the complex template generator —Yoda8myhead (talk) Mon, 17 May 2010 23:23:38 +0000

I also noticed that the simple generator isn't populating the double brackets of the title field with the contents entered. It also doesn't have the nice, selectable text window like the complex one. :-D —Yoda8myhead (talk) Wed, 19 May 2010 01:10:13 +0000

An excellent suggestion. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:14:30 +0000