Template talk:Bc

Oh man this is useful. Good work.
--Quetzilla 00:19, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Documentation needs to be updated

Haama, you need to update the documentation here, too. It seems as if you need to repeat entries every time? Also, I think there are some mistakes in the code, but I'm not sure because I'm not certain how it is supposed to work. Update the doc so I can help out.
DragoonWraith · talk · 01:24, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that - had to run shortly after finishing it. I've updated the docs - had to use a few tricks, but it looks nice! I really like the formatting you suggested.

--Haama 04:46, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

DW, I never was quite sure what you meant by "repeat entries every time". Did the code look right (now that the notes are there)?

--Haama 20:20, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Newline after "back to:" text

Is the newline really necessary? It creates a bunch of dead whitespace below the page title above the breadcrumb links which pushes the important page content down the page more than it otherwise would be. Normally breadcrumb links like these are styled so that they appear closely below the page title or other form of navigation without taking up a lot of space. Perhaps the "Back to: " text could even go away? If not, can we at least condense the template to take up only a single line.
--SnakeChomp 19:28, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I kind of like having "Back to:" because it makes it very obvious what those links are for, which I consider a good thing (people didn't understand this on the CSwiki which used Categories for the same thing). The newline is there because I think "Back to: < blah < blah < blah" looks ugly.

However, I'm just one person and these are just my opinions. If others feel differently on one or both of these, feel free to change this.

DragoonWraith · talk · 20:26, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

"Back to: < blah < blah" sure does look ugly, but thats easy enough to fix.. =)

The conventional style (IMO) for these kind of links is something like this under one of the banners near the top of the page (using any kind of delimiter, not necessarily just >).

Auto Aim Settings

Main Page > Settings > Auto Aim Settings

Page body

I don't think that "Back to:" is really necessary when it is formatted like this. If anything, "Nagivation: " could be the prefix, but it is kind of obvious that the links are there to aid navigation (IMO).

Also note that I think we should always include the "Main Page" link as the first link shown by the Bc template as doing so helps make it more clear that there is a hierarchy amongst all the pages pages and what said hierarchy is, but whether we can do this by default depends on how people are using the template today. It work for all the settings pages for instance, but perhaps not everywhere.

--SnakeChomp 22:02, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe we should just ask Beth to install the Breadcrumbs extension?

DragoonWraith · talk · 00:05, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

If you look at User:SnakeChomp/Formula_Formatting_test, that is how the back to links should look. Immediately below the page title taking up minimal space. If we can make this template look like the ones the wiki auto generates I think that would be ideal. It should be a simple matter of copying the html generated for subpages by the wiki and putting it in the template.

--SnakeChomp 17:37, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Trying to mimick wiki generated links

I updated the template to look just like the links the wiki generates for subpages, but when the template is the first thing on the page the wiki is generating source with an empty <div id="contentSub"><div> block just before the <div> block for the link, so it is adding a small blank line before the link. I can't figure out how to make that go away. I think its just always generated as part of the software to hold the links when subpages are being used, even if the page isn't actually a subpage. Probably out of my hands. At least I think the template looks better now. It also makes sense to use this within sections in a page too now that the format is similar to the links the wiki can already generate.

Test section 2

--SnakeChomp 20:38, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Interesting, the template seems to mess up when used in this namespace... It is trying to link to "Main Page" in the "Template Talk" namespace. Is that expected behavior?

--SnakeChomp 20:39, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

I managed to fudge moving the Bc generated links upwards a bit with a negative top margin and positive bottom margin. It's not ideal, but it looks reasonable at least.

--SnakeChomp 21:35, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Negative margins are the only way you'll achieve that effect. It should look pretty good, though.

Anyway, yes, it is expected that the template defaults to going back to the current namespace. As far as I know (and I have looked), there is no way to strip the ns: bit from the beginning of the link for the sake of the hyper-text (you can do this while editing by using the "pipe trick", i.e. [[:Category:Getting Started|]] will be replaced with [[:Category:Getting Started|Getting Started]] when you Save, but that's straight replacement in the plaintext, a la ~~~~, and is therefore unsuitable for a template), which means it's very awkward to include the ability to change the namespace.

DragoonWraith · talk · 23:04, 16 January 2009 (UTC)